It Was Just 16 Years Ago

Rounding the corner off Denver Tech Center Drive, there it was, the Denver Marriott where the CoSIDA Convention was held in 1995. I have fond memories of that convention -- and of a particular book store near Cherry Creek. It was that year that one of the speakers talked about this new thing -- the world wide web -- and how if we were going to reach out to our fans, we -- SIDs -- better get on board. I went out after the session and bought my first book on how to write HTML, and went back to Fayetteville to start the first of several websites for the University of Arkansas and others. That's coming full circle this year, and more on that later.

I keep that book on the corner of my desk, serving as a reminder that you have to stay on the front edge. A couple of years later, another vivid memory from the SEC SID meeting. After a back and forth about email versus fax, I pissed off one SID in particular in the room (who knows, maybe others) when I said off-handed that we were the last generation of analog SID; that the future was digital.

Now, we look back on those Mosaic pages and chuckle. Heck, I look at the Web 2.0 and think, that's pretty static now with the coming wave of 3.0 and beyond -- the mobile and potentially semantic web.

Born analog in this business in the 1980s; reborn digital in the 1990s; streaming mobile in the 21st century.

Well, at least we can say, it's never boring.