10 Years!

I just realized the other day that this year is my ten-year anniversary of being on the web. I had an email address the year before, I think, but didn't know how to use it (and, for whatever reason, wasn't that interested in figuring out how). But in 1995 a friend introduced me to the web (we used Lynx back then, though Netscape followed not too long after). It wasn't long before I was spending way too much time surfing and reading newsgroups (and using web documents as references for homework). By the next year, I had my own website (The Swordsmithy--it had a bibliography, a glossary, and links, and it was the first place besides the APALA conference proceedings that "From Rapier to Langsax" appeared; that article is the one that seems to be all over the place on the web now, though only one site ever asked permission to use it).

Anyway. Ten years. Now I can't imagine trying to do research or collect things or keep up to date on all the various things I'm interested in without the web. Which isn't to say I couldn't live without it (I can, after all, make an arrowhead out of a beer bottle bottom), it would just be a very different world.