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I first used the Web in the summer of 1994. Is that right? It would have been the summer after my sophomore year at William & Mary, when I got an account on the no-longer-extant Birds machines. The Birds machines were IBM RS/6000s that had been donated to the Computer Science department, and only Area III (science) majors were supposed to be able to get accounts on them. Well, and tech support people. So I got one. They were called the birds because each machine was named after a bird. The main machine was eagle, which you only telnetted in to if you needed to change a password or something. There were a couple machines that had "cool" names that tended to get logged into more often than others. Nighthawk and kingfisher are the two that stick in my memory. Blackbird ran a fairly distant third. Very few guys logged into nutcracker. Go figure.

Anyway, if you actually sat down at one of the computers, and fired up XWindows, you could launch Mosaic, and ohmygod, you were on the Web. I had no idea how any of it worked. Thankfully, Mosaic had a fairly useful page that it went to on startup. Or, at least, it seemed useful when you didn't know anything else. I'd drop by the lab once a week or so and just see what I could find. Then one of the guys I worked with told us about a new browser that had come out by an upstart company of the same name. Netscape. Big purple throbbing 'N'.

And, since that's how I got started on the Web, that's sort of how I think of it still, at least in a little way. Sort of as a geeky little neat toy that no one else really cares about.

If you've got anything resembling a pulse, you know how completely removed from the truth that is.

I remember when TV ads started having URLs in them. I don't remember the first one I saw, but I remember the feeling I had. Sort of a vague confusion, mixed with the thought (which was a massive understatement) "Is this really going to catch on?" I mean, yes, I thought that email was really great, I'd make cracks about what it'd be like if my parents were on email. I thought it'd never happen. Chalk up another lousy prediction. Damn good thing I don't bet on horses, eh?

It got to the point where I'd let out this yelp of pain whenever I saw a URL in a commercial. Liz still gives me a reassuring pat on the head when we're watching something and a URL comes on the screen. "This is ridiculous," I thought.

And now I've got a shirt that has a URL on it. It's my company's web page. Web site. Whatever. I got it for a conference I'm going to in June. I wore it yesterday, and all day I kept looking down at my sleeve and thinking, "I'm wearing a URL on my sleeve. What has the world come to?".