The creation of WHUFFLES! She said, modestly.

Metafilter's longest thread! Metafilter's favourite userscript! (Not much, really).

Excellent. That's just the kind of stuff I was looking for.

The Metafilter sexism threads. Generally I give up on those long threads at a certain point, but I held on for those until (almost? they might still be going!) the bitter end. That was a fun weekend.

The weird thing about the internet is how fragmented the neighborhoods are ... I can think of a few things that seemed so notable at the time, but are all but forgotten now.

I was working for a dot com in Bubble 1.0. We were going to build the UK's first online $product_X store.

Then we came in one day and found we'd been beaten to it. The joke someone made was that fortunately they'd made first a global variable in the web code, so we could just keep changing it from first to second to third to fourth...

Being part of a Flickr Meetup group that just did our first gallery opening last week.

There was a period of time during the run of the Aural Times—probably starting around April 2006 or so—when I'd gotten my stride with the project and gotten some nice coverage from Mefi and Waxy and even Yahoo and hadn't really started to feel the energy cost of doing it long term.

And for a couple of months there I felt like, okay, this is it, this is really something, I'm doing it. And then it just got to be harder and harder to do the work and not feel burnt out and I realized that it was a pretty insanely niche project and that for as much as I liked the creative side of it I had no idea how to turn it into anything besides an extremely time-consuming blog that earned me about ten dollars a month.

As personal experiences go, that's probably the whammy. I hope it won't be the highwater mark, but I could do worse.

I was a clueless young oarsman on the dotcom longboat. I will cherish my doomed summer employment at bungo.com (who? exactly.) all my life, for various reasons not all of which are unironic.

I really enjoyed my brief side-line presence on alt.religion.kibology years ago. I don't know that it was a pivotal period of ARK history or that my contributions were anything other than college-student farts in the wind, but it had a profound affect on me to really grok that whole crew.

I'm delighted and still sort of amazed to have been a part of and to now be an employee of mefi.

I think being present to take this photo is the highlight of my internet life.

my brief side-line presence on alt.religion.kibology years ago

OMG ME TOO!!1!!1!!!

When were you there? It was 95 / 96 for me.

So many...

The first website I designed was pretty big. It was a really boring government thing, but it got something like 15,000 hits the first month. In 1996!

The first time I met, IRL, someone I had previously known only through the internet. The next few subsequent times, too. Then Maggy Donea of Water (and other stuff) threw a party and invited everyone on the internet, basically. Turned out, it was only a mile or so from where I lived at the time. That was wild. Most people there had never met in person, so it wasn't at all strange when someone came up and hugged me, and I had tyo ask who she was. The meetings before had seemed like anomalies, but here was this whole big group of folks who had only the internet in common. This was 1998. Jesus--a decade ago.

Metafilter related stuff ranks up there, too. Winning a TiVo was awesome. The 9/11 thread was amazing, too. The best, of course, was NortonDC and onlyconnect's wedding, though.

It was 95 / 96 for me.

99-01 or so for me. BTW, you're officially on the list of people who I presume are the same age as me even though they're actually a few years older. Drives me crazy every time.

Otis M. Beard (I think it was?) faked his death shortly after I stopped hanging out there, I think, which was even weirder for me to find out afterward because I actually worked with the guy at a call center one summer in college.

He introduced me to Nethack on the job, god bless him. He was a pretty bad employee and he liked it that way -- you can kind of imagine how a hardcore ARKer would be exactly the sort of person who could leverage their superior language/persuasion skills to get away with murder under lax management.

I might be messing up some of the timeline on all that, I don't know. It's hazy.

Oh you won a TiVo too?

I prototyped the first PDF plug-in for Macintosh web browsers. It worked in Netscape and Spyglass (remember them? Didn't think so) and let you follow links from PDF into the browsers and vice-versa.

Having thought about this (when I posted this question, I actually didn't even know what kind of answers I was looking for), it seems to me that history mostly took place before I joined the 'net. Since then, everything's been moving really slowly. History still takes place, but it's not the history of big events; it's a history of gradual changes.

Right around the time of the Kaycee Nicole scandal, I was corresponding with the guy in Hong Kong who was the one who set up "her" website, etc-BWG, if you remember-and he had a caption contest. We had to caption a picture of this HUMONGUOUS roll of toilet paper beside a toilet and sink...my caption was " Now all we need to do is teach the hamster to flush."

A few days after the Kaycee Nicole thing was exposed, he announced the winner. Twas me.

I got a teeshirt.

"We have cameras" still kills me.

I'm with Essexjan. To fête the nuptials of Jon and Pips was an iHonor.

Also: smoking a joint with ParisParamus.

The Conversatron, R.I.P.

Probably the two big moments of Internet history I remember are the 9/11 thread and the introduction of Gmail.

My fondest music moments were being a music snob on alt.music.ska, which is incredibly foolish in retrospect.

Two i withhold for future disclosure reasons, two i have mentioned often, one i will consider posting later.
Five random accusations i agree i may be somewhat culpable for, in part.

I still think Magdalena Donea's stuff was the reason for the Internet. Love love love. And I just rediscovered an old thread on kottke that's brought back a ton of great memories.

Have I really been creating websites for 15 years now? Bizarre.

Holy shit, ParisParamus is a stoner?!?!
Also, Essexjan, I love love love that picture.
I haven't been present in anything cool or groundbreaking online. I'm a lurker pretty much everywhere but here, and sometimes over on the green.

plinth: great link!

I remember getting my first email address that wasn't a random string of numbers. That was cool.

This is the moment I fell in love with the Internet.

I created graphics for eWorld (Apple's AOL clone), and I did a Time Machine graphic for Sun that was used on a very early Java demo. And I did the splash screen for Mac IE 4. My earliest internet memory is that graphics created on a Mac looked like crap on Windows and Sun workstations, and no one I knew could really explain why. I didn't actually have a direct web connection so I had to adjust the colors and send them to my friend who would look at them on a Sun box and tell me if they were OK, very slow process.

I built the MeFi taglines page, where I collected all the taglines from MeFi, MeTa and Askme and listed them all out, with links to the comments. Problems in keeping it up-to-date made it hard work and continued phenomenal amounts of comment spam (I assume because of the close links to MeFi or something) made me give it up entirely.

Fun while it lasted, though.

I kinda think the introduction of the Web via Mosaic. Not that I had anything to do with that, but I was accessing the internet through unix terminals in college, and the internet was like this awesome secret about free communication and gaming and file transfer. I remember snipping an article out the paper, while in college, about this thing called the Internet hitting the mark of 2 million users! And then...they had to have pictures. The earliest version of eBay, I was very into: it looked like Craigslist.

In MeFi memory, the Katrina threads stand out. I was glued, glued to both MeFi and the news networks as it unfolded. My solitary disbelief from watching the insanity on TV turned into communal shock, grief, and action through the sharing of it on MeFi. I think that was the first national event in which I was aware that the internet had actually transformed the way we were processing, influencing, and learning about the event, not just chatting about it after the fact.

I remember my dad teaching me to telnet into the weather underground box.

I helped do the very first US-based web coverage of the Tour de France, in 1994.. I did a fair amount of hand transcribing faxes from journalists into text files for subsequent html-ization. I also remember that Yahoo came onto the scene that summer.

Later I was the tech guy at a web design shop that did Flash-based games for Disney, and we were some of the first folks to realize that Flash could be more than a banner ad.. Cripe, what was it called before Wacromedia bought it and renamed it Flash? Something with a crab in the logo, IIRC.

The same crowd did much of the icon design for AOL's early IM versions. Same crowd also landed the first contract to do OldNavy.com.

one afternoon, I got really annoyed at something in in Windows 98 and wrote a ripping good flame to Microsoft techsupport, involving phrases like "You are the platinum-iridium standard of suck against which all other suck is measured; although much like the decibel is a fraction of the Bel, the common usage is in nano-sucks..." My boss liked it and sent it to a mutual aquaintance of ours, who subsequently sent it to his pal who happened to cover technology for the NYT, and that person replied with a note along the lines of "Ha, that was great, forwarded it to Bill's private address." Oh my.. Just don't send it to Kevin Bacon, mkay?

I was, for a time, root @ cartalk.com. It was during that gig that a coworker ran into the room and said "My buddy just IM'd me from NY, an airplane just hit the WTC!" So we went to CNN.com, which was down, and at that moment, we knew it was true.

Not only was I once in the Pacific Premier league at http://hattrick.org - but my original team captain was also the first captain of the Oceania national team - once 'national' teams were introduced.

None of which will mean anything to anyone who didn't waste a few months playing hattrick.

In late '93 I and some friends incorporated Canada's first commercial ISP. We didn't light up until early '04 as the University Of Toronto controlled the .ca domain and would not give us a .ca designation as we were a for profit company. We had to bring in lawyers and rattle the sabers.

Our 56k fractional fiber link to uuNet cost almost $12,000 a month.

My close friend and I had to fight an ugly proxy battle to win control of the firm.

In the first year we saw the Internet writ large.

After less than a year in business one of our best customers came in to cancel her service. She was moving to Texas to live with a guy she met on the Internet.

We charged $32 a month for 8 hours of access and $4.50 an hour after that. Several customers ran up more than $100 a month playing muds and moos.

The cops came by. First because some dude in Germany took $700 from some local for some product never delivered. Next time they came because some perv in NH was chatting up a 14 year old girl in our town. Third time because a man had a bunch of child porn on his computer.

A guy came in to bitch about a $70 monthly bill. There was "no way he could owe that much". We pulled the logs and it turned out all the extra time came when his 16 year old daughter was home alone and in irc.

In '96 Bell telephone tried to shut us down. We brought in access from across the border via spread spectrum wireless link to MCI. Bell called in the Canadian radio spectrum regulators to shut us down. I had done the research and knew we were safe due to a little known law from WW II that allowed cross border wireless communication without licence as long as it was below a certain wattage. I confronted the government official and then got to hear my my business partner utter the line "cummon Karl, strap on a chest wig and make a fucking decision!"

Just after that a rival company started up offering access at less then our cost. I did a bit of digging and found out that all thier traffic went through one of the area school board's network. A bit more digging found that the owner of the upstart firm was the boyfriend of the IT director of said school board. A call to the provincial minister of education got that shut down in 48 hours.

Ultimately we went bankrupt.

My strict rule of keeping a wall of separation between work and personal stuff online keeps me from giving details, but I did a couple of first-of-their-kind within-my-field projects in the 90s. Nothing super impressive, just proof-of-concept pieces meant to start the ball rolling and encourage further work. They're still online, but I don't work for the organization that maintains them. I just got an email message from a university student who wants to interview me about the development, which is kinda flattering.

I don't have any.

I mean, I might have been there but I don't remember. And if you don't have images, there's no PROOF!