My first Internet experience was email in 1990. Gopher was a big deal in the early '90s. Someone at the San Jose Mercury News had set up a daily list of news a

My first Internet experience was email in 1990. Gopher was a big deal in the early '90s. Someone at the San Jose Mercury News had set up a daily list of news articles, which was important to me as I lived overseas. It was tedious to navigate but it let me access information I couldn't otherwise read. Around that time the WWW was making mainstream inroads, thanks in part to the Oklahoma City terrorism attack. I remember watching a TV news report that found an early militia website with Timothy McVeigh's personal profile on it. It was a shocking revelation - anyone could publish anything for the world to see. Traditional gatekeepers did not have as much power in this new environment. Not long thereafter, I downloaded Mosaic onto a gigantic Windows 3.1 laptop with a black and white LCD monitor, found an MIT HTML tutorial, and I was hooked. The early days before gigantic scripts and inscrutable CSS took over were a joy. It felt possible to do so much with so little - even coding in a simple text editor and the basic Mosaic/Netscape tools.