Re:Where were you when... (Score 1)

1994. I was just out of graduate school and teaching physical science in my hometown. I had made friends with an officer from the Naval Postgraduate School who was also an Amateur Radio operator (N7HPR). It would be a year before Netcom would provide dialup for a 14.4 modem, so his ability to dial-in from home with a "secure" line to a Linux box he set up at NPS was novel. He used Trumpet WinSock and NCSA Mosaic, and we stayed up all night playing. It blew my mind, and we both knew what we wanted to do with it: Educate. I never thought anybody would pay me to play that way. The Web was going to be an avocation; they're fools to pay us to do what we do.

This was on the heals of learning about email. I had an account in grad school, but not enough peers in my field had one, so it was rarely used. It wasn't until I had to build a packet radio station while living in Hawaii for two years that I really appreciated digital communications. A letter to my Dad would take a couple of days to hop from the islands to California, no better than the pony express but saving us a great deal in phone bills. Sure helped my Dad understand the concept when I convinced him to get one of those Netcom accounts years later.