Categories
Digital Culture

Ah….Usenet

Inspired partially by this post of Walt’s, I decided to see what I could find as my oldest record of being on the web. Looks like it’s this post to bit.listserv.new-list when I set up the first email listserv for the state of Kentucky’s academic honors programs.

Date? Oct 27 1992. So that means, if we take this as my first moment online, that I just passed my 13th anniversary of the ‘net. Of course, this was posted from Bitnet and not the Internet, and I was on long before this, but it’s still an interesting look back. I’ve checked the Wayback machine to see if they had captured any of my old original homepages, but it doesn’t look like it. *sigh* The sorts of things you don’t think will be important…I’d love to see some of that stuff. I wrote my first webpage on emacs, across a dumb terminal, BEFORE Mosaic…just text and hyperlinks. It was the coolest thing in the world. That would have been sometime in ’92, I think. I also had a homepage on a old ISP in Athens, OH when we moved there in 1996 or so called frognet.net. Can’t seem to find that either.

Ah well…interesting to think of being on the nets for so long, and that now they are literally just part of my daily life. What’s anyone else’s earliest web presence?

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *