A really long time

Have you seen Yahoo!’s birthday ‘netrospective’ yet? It sure does bring back memories.

I’ve been online for a decade as well, and have had a personal website for nine of those years. The structured style of HTML and pixel-perfect positioning of CSS (but for browser differences… sigh) suit my personality to a T; I can create without having to be traditionally artistic (which then sets off the internal argument whether or not this is possible, and if it is, is it therefore of lesser value, since my copy of Adobe Photoshop is woefully underutilised), and all by dancing my fingers around on a keyboard. My piano teacher despaired of my lack of interest in her favourite subject, and now I make websites, not music, by doing almost the same thing.

Looking at the images Yahoo! has put up, they seem so long ago. I can’t even remember what it was like to not have Internet access, be it at home or at an Internet cafe. For all its faults and glitches, abuses and hoaxes, the Internet opened up a whole new world for me. Now we have weblogs, and that’s another world again, the dark and murky world of people’s minds. It’s fascinating.

If someone told me I’d have to choose between, say french fries and the Internet, I’d elect to keep the Internet. And you know how much I love french fries.

Yahoo! was the first search engine I used when I first started searching, way back in 1995. Happy Birthday, Yahoo!

• 2 Mar 2005