It's late August and my thoughts turn to a pivotal event in my life that happened now 22 years ago. Sometime earlier, in about 1996, we had a home computer and had just installed Windows 95 on it. We used it to work on Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets and to watch flying toasters or Captain Kirk on an After Dark screensaver. The term "online" was still just a special case of the computer world. We had one of those 300-baud modems where you dialed a phone number and stuck the receiver down on a cradle after the irritating tone appeared.
Like so many others of the day, I signed up for an AOL account. They sent their software on CDs seemingly every other day with a new offer for X00 free hours of online time. Going online back then was a different experience. After dialing, I'd land in AOL's little world of online stuff, but it would be a little while longer before I found the way to the actual World Wide Web.
I recall there was a couple of Web search engines available other than AOL's own. One was AltaVista and another was WebCrawler. These all predated Google. Searching one day in the spring of 1997 on one or the other of those, I entered "Herb Alpert" and saw a site listed of Rudy's A&M Corner. Clicking on the link, I was taken nowhere. I don't know if the Corner was down, the search engine gliched, or my X00 free hours were up. But I moved on to something else.
In August of that year, we took a weekend trip up to Vermont and New Hampshire, stayed at a B&B and then started for home, stopping in Hartford, which is where we heard the news about Princess Diana. After arriving home, I again did a "Herb Alpert" search on one of the search engines and found Rudy's A&M Corner again. This time I got through to the discographies on the site and a Fan Contact page. It was a page where a user could sign a guestbook and see all of the others who'd signed up too.
There, I saw names like Steve Sidoruk, Mike Blakesley, Richard Warner and other stalwarts like our Mr Bill, along with others who were around here in the beginning and have moved on in life I suppose. Once I found my may to the A&M Corner Forum, I was hooked. Literally. For the next 22 years, I've made this the first stop every day, with frequent stops during every day. Early on, there was so much to learn. I knew almost nothing about so many A&M artists, but knew a lot about others. We shared our discoveries, our knowledge, and how we acquired it.
CDs were the format of the day, and all of us were eagerly awaiting any news of discs from our favorite artists. Japan was a great source of product, but this was before much in the way of online ordering, so we relied on sites like Thoughtscape Sounds and Dusty Grooves to import the Japanese discs and sell them to us. Meanwhile, we relied on our trusty vinyl to get us through our music needs.
True story: today, I walked by a calendar on our fridge and the date hit me: 2019! Really? Isn't that the year that BLADE RUNNER takes place? Well, they say time flies when you're having fun, so I must be having fun with all of you out there in Internet land that the days have flown by.
Harry
...older, not necessarily wiser, online...
Like so many others of the day, I signed up for an AOL account. They sent their software on CDs seemingly every other day with a new offer for X00 free hours of online time. Going online back then was a different experience. After dialing, I'd land in AOL's little world of online stuff, but it would be a little while longer before I found the way to the actual World Wide Web.
I recall there was a couple of Web search engines available other than AOL's own. One was AltaVista and another was WebCrawler. These all predated Google. Searching one day in the spring of 1997 on one or the other of those, I entered "Herb Alpert" and saw a site listed of Rudy's A&M Corner. Clicking on the link, I was taken nowhere. I don't know if the Corner was down, the search engine gliched, or my X00 free hours were up. But I moved on to something else.
In August of that year, we took a weekend trip up to Vermont and New Hampshire, stayed at a B&B and then started for home, stopping in Hartford, which is where we heard the news about Princess Diana. After arriving home, I again did a "Herb Alpert" search on one of the search engines and found Rudy's A&M Corner again. This time I got through to the discographies on the site and a Fan Contact page. It was a page where a user could sign a guestbook and see all of the others who'd signed up too.
There, I saw names like Steve Sidoruk, Mike Blakesley, Richard Warner and other stalwarts like our Mr Bill, along with others who were around here in the beginning and have moved on in life I suppose. Once I found my may to the A&M Corner Forum, I was hooked. Literally. For the next 22 years, I've made this the first stop every day, with frequent stops during every day. Early on, there was so much to learn. I knew almost nothing about so many A&M artists, but knew a lot about others. We shared our discoveries, our knowledge, and how we acquired it.
CDs were the format of the day, and all of us were eagerly awaiting any news of discs from our favorite artists. Japan was a great source of product, but this was before much in the way of online ordering, so we relied on sites like Thoughtscape Sounds and Dusty Grooves to import the Japanese discs and sell them to us. Meanwhile, we relied on our trusty vinyl to get us through our music needs.
True story: today, I walked by a calendar on our fridge and the date hit me: 2019! Really? Isn't that the year that BLADE RUNNER takes place? Well, they say time flies when you're having fun, so I must be having fun with all of you out there in Internet land that the days have flown by.
Harry
...older, not necessarily wiser, online...