Prior to the pandemic, I'd head into Manhattan a couple of days a week for a client (I was a hybrid worker before hybrid working was cool). I'd buy a sandwich at the corner deli before heading into work for two reasons; it was cheaper than buying a sandwich in Manhattan, and I'd be less likely to pick up the McDonald's McDouble bundle to “save money”.
The sandwich would run me $5.00. I was in the deli the other day, and the current price list was on the counter. The same sandwich would cost me $7.50 today. That's a 50% increase over three years. This economy is scary.
My First Webpage
Today is an anniversary of some sort. On this date in 1993, I published my first web page. I had an account on Mindvox mostly for their conferences (forums), and access to the pre-web Internet (email, usenet, IRC, archie, gopher, etc). Since I had a shell, I had the ability to publish a webpage so I created a simple, “Hello World” page just to try it out. I found a copy of that file in my archives recently.
The web wasn't a two way medium then like it is now. Content was statically built, and not served out of CMSes. To publish to the web you had to understand HTML and a little bit about how Web servers worked. From a design perspective, webpages looked simpler back then, but were much harder to create, manage and publish.
I didn't anticipate the commercialization of the web. I just saw it as a way to inter-link and retrieve files, a tool that would mainly be used by scientists and academics. Basically a better gopher.
I didn't anticipate the ability for the average person to be able to contribute to it without some technical knowledge. Since the whole thing was very "wild west" the notion of conducting commerce over the network seemed like a fantasy. Don't get me wrong I knew online commerce would happen someday, I just imagined a more secure protocol would be built for it. Amazingly, that technology that I discounted became the basis for my career going forward.
| Seán Reiser