Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML

Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML, the university printed them and placed boxes of the booklets in the lobby of half a dozen of the main buildings so people could just grab them. And I think about half the student body did. A couple of weeks later I was hitching a ride with someone and we started talking about what we do. He said that "I'm teaching people this new thing called HTML". Then he reached back into the back seat and pulled out a booklet. He had a whole box of them. Apparently he had just taken a whole box of them from the university and was using this as his course material. I never told him I wrote it. Actually, I was a bit proud that someone could make a living using teaching materials I'd written and I didn't want to embarrass him. (And since the university had printed boxes of them it wasn't like there was any shortage. My main mission was to get people to use WWW so I didn't mind). I'd probably cringe if I read it today :-). (However the thing I'm most proud of from that period was to ensure that policies on student access to publishing materials on their homepages without needing to get the content explicitly approved were adopted across norwegian universities. There was a meeting between the universities to figure out what policies to adopt. I didn't have any real authority, but I managed to convince everyone that what students put on their homepages is none of our business as long as they don't break the law or hurt themselves or someone else. During that period I also learned that one of the most efficient ways to kill bad policies is to follow them to the letter and generate so much work for other people they need to rethink the policies. :-))