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February 23rd, |
2002 |
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a little history
So it’s 1995 and I’m in tenth grade. The computer we had at the house was an IBM, running off DOS 1, ..point something or other. We played Tetris on it. Maybe we got that new win 3.1 machine a couple of months later. I forget. I’m sitting in a high school graphic design class in Arkansas. I am cool. Because I’m such a wiz at Microsoft Paint and Deluxe Paint II. Step off – you can’t hang with these skills. A 386 over in the corner sits by itself. For some reason we’re not supposed to use it. Nobody did. It was connected to the internet - or something like that. Sure the internet sounded interesting. Yuppies were using it to pay their taxes, and once or twice I’d heard people talking about “bulletin boards.” Nerds. Mick Dundee turns on the television in that fancy New York hotel and Lucy is on. “Yeah, I seen that.” Am I better off with the internet? Probably. Do I love it? Yeah maybe. Is it better than television? Heck yeah. So in 1995 this teacher sits Matt and I at down at the coveted Windows machine and launches Netscape 1.2. She is going to give us a quick rundown on what it is, and what we can use it for. You type the address up here, in this address bar. Here is h,t,t,p…something something what the heck is she doing…Yahoo.com. You can search for stuff here. This is the internet. Don’t look at porn. Mmkay. In 96, Drew is enrolled at a community college in the afternoon, taking a computer repair course with other high school students from surrounding school districts. Our teacher is Mr. Little, a retired Air Force computer security specialist, who had only recently moved to Arkansas for this job, after his heart attack. He was a really swell guy – and a great teacher – in that he taught us valuable nuggets of wisdom everyday and then set us free to do whatever we wanted, as long as it involved the computers that were sitting in front of us. The green-toothed guy from Poyen and the two fat kids from Bismark played Solitaire and occasionally Minesweeper. Some kid from Sheridan who went by the name Joel Blan, had a friend. I can’t remember his friend’s name. Anyway this guy falls out of his chair when he finds out that a website called “Geocities,” was letting people have free websites. Who cares. You’re a nerd. I go back to looking at funny pics on Gallery of The Absurd. That’s what the internet was for. You don’t put stuff on the internet. The internet has people who put stuff on there, for you. You just look. So go ahead and make your little web, ..page or whatever. A couple of days pass and I begin curiously observing what’s going on with the nerd boy from Sheridan and his little web, page, thing. Ok this may sound a little strange. But there have been moments in my life where huge double doors have been opened in my brain – times when I step back and say: wow this is cool. I am going to do this. It doesn’t matter how hard it may appear, because it will be fun. This wasn’t one of those times. It happened slower. Over a period of days I started thinking about what this guy was actually doing with his web page. He was sitting in a little corner, hacking away at learning and applying html tags to his index page, and sending it to his geocities site, where then, ..anybody, ..from anywhere in the world, ..could look at it. Anybody. So I approach and begin asking questions. How does this work? What do I do next? HTML? Whats that? Shut up. I’m not retarted. Green teeth over there is. I’m gonna learn how to do this. So. “Drew’s Wild and Crazy World of Graphics” would soon appear on the internet. Comprising the above title in bold black text and an appropriated animated beavis graphic, I had put something on the internet. I. Me – with a worldwide audience. It was something you could tell your parents about. They were proud. It grew. This is Drew. ok that was corny.
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