The past was prologue

OK, back to the nostalgia. Morning Retort has as nice an introductory post as you're likely to see. She (he?) puts blogging in context, going back to the early days of the web.

Do you remember the first time you used a browser? It would have been about 10 years ago this spring, for me. My friend Matt, the CS major from down the hall, was urging me to quit relying on gopher and FTP. He said to try this WWW thing, because the interface was cooler and you could see text and pictures at the same time. He demonstrated it for me by downloading Mosaic onto my spiffy 486-33.

And then we typed in a web address... and waited.

"It takes a while to load pages, though."
"Oh."

But that page did eventually load. And then another, and another. And then, I think, a popup ad for those video cameras.

Even on that spring day ten years ago, I imagined I'd have a web presence. I imagined people from around the world -- several dozen, even -- would be curious to read my words. And I thought that maybe if it didn't include pictures, it would load faster.

Years later, this would come to pass. But blogborygmi was not the beginning! The Bacon Page, with its running diary of my encounters with the greasy meat, would have to qualify as my first blog. The site also featured reader mail, including testimonials and bacon haiku. It was well-liked, and even garnered some dubious awards. Alas, I took it down when I started med school, and felt I should be promoting public health.

I didn't know about Atkins back in 1998. But bacon's emergence as a mainstream, health-conscious food seems to have taken that "forbidden meat" luster from it. Otherwise, other bacon sites may not be defunct, either.

If you've got the hankering to visit the early web of yore, check out the Wayback Machine. Early web sites are profiled, such as Amazon's first page and other relics, rescued from the dustbin of history.