Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

The post I wrote last week about the future of Internet companies left me feeling a bit nostalgic. I remember my first time as it was only yesterday.

One of my best friends worked as an IT manager at a local Hospital. One Saturday night we were hanging around doing nothing and then he threw the fatal question: “Have you ever done it?”. And I, totally ashamed, answered with the truth: “No, never”. I was 24 back then.

He then mentioned that he had managed to get the Hospital to buy a Startel link, the company that had the monopoly of Internet connections in Argentina and sold a 64K for about U$S 15,000 per month. At that time he said: “Today will be your first time. I’ll introduce you to the World Wide Web.”

It was love at first sight. I faced the Chameleon browser and thought what on Earth I could look at. I was nervous. Would she realize I had never done it before? If I take too long to type a url she would notice I was totally inexperienced! Come on, think of something!!!

I considered what interesting things the US held and Harvard came to mind. And I wrote:  www.harvard.com. There it was a very raw page from the Harvard Book Shop. I was wrong! She had surely noticed already. But then I tried www.harvard.edu anyway and then MIT and from there on to Yahoo. It was October 1995 and even if the first time is never up to par with your dreams, we never separated again.

All the links in the previous paragraph take you to a marvelous project called Internet Archive Wayback Machine. This archive holds almost daily copies of most of the websites that ever existed and allows you to see how they evolved in time. It is an endless source of interesting stuff.

That way, nostalgic people like myself can find old friends like Pointcast (or the Argentine version made by a friend of mine, Newsclick), remember when we all thought we would be very rich using AllAdvantage or when you discovered Instant Messaging and downloaded ICQ.

You can even see the remnants of the first Officenet website, which back then was called Office Net and we did not have today’s url but www.on-officenet.com (the great story of how I got www.officenet.com I leave it for some other day).

To close, I invite all readers who are willing and not shy to share how their first time was and what websites or applications of yesteryear you loved and sorely miss.

Photo: Marco.Chiaraluce