Stories from the BBS era, early internet, dot-com bubble, and the technologies that shaped today. First-hand accounts from being there.
22 articles
Grace Hopper's famous nanosecond wire demonstration—and why understanding physical constraints still matters for every system we build today.
CompuServe had first-mover advantage, loyal users, and great technology. They still lost to AOL. The lessons about platform economics, business model evolution, and corporate ownership remain relevant...
In 1996 at MSNBC, I built Workbench - a content management system for editors, copy editors, and photo teams before the term CMS existed. Workflow automation for non-technical users....
A BBS sysop friend got hacked through social engineering in 1987. Watching it happen taught me that the most dangerous vulnerabilities aren't in code - they're in assumptions about trust....
Running BBSs in the 1980s meant handling hardware, limited connections, users gaming the system, moderation, and community - with no cloud, no scaling, no support tickets. Lessons that still apply....
First-person account of running Core Logic Software during the 2000-2002 dot-com crash. When the NASDAQ fell 78% and 4,854 internet companies died, what it looked like from inside the ecosystem....
During the Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered to the USS Missouri's Pioneer UAV - the first surrender to a drone in history. Connecting military autonomous systems history to today's AI debates....
I built Web Spy - a desktop app that crawled and cached websites for offline reading. This was before HTTrack, before Pocket, before Instapaper. Never shipped it....
Dog-eared, coffee-stained, held together by stubbornness and nostalgia. The programming books from the late 1970s that started a 45-year journey in technology....
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and chat for 3 million users before the web. The community-building lessons from that era—invested moderators, friction as a feature, human-scale communities—remain...
FidoNet was a global network connecting thousands of BBSs via scheduled phone calls. Email, newsgroups, file distribution - everything we associate with the internet existed first on FidoNet....
Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite - BBS door games created the template for online gaming. First-person perspective from a SysOp who ran them....
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