netcom

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...

Set the Wayback Machine to February 1995, and let’s head back to the Netcom offices. I’d been promoted from tech support to email administration by now, so I was no longer trailing into the office at 5 PM — which is not to say I was an early riser by any means, so that day I got in around 10 AM or so. Either way, I was completely weirded out to see a total stranger sacked out in a sleeping bag under Robert Hood’s desk over in the network administrator bullpen. ...

My friend Sarah Gould keeps telling me I should write an autobiography because I love telling stories. I cannot deny the premise of the argument, and I know I want to redevelop my writing skills; thus, I’m going to start capturing some of those tales of how I got from there to here. Like all good stories, I’m going to start in the middle. Don’t expect any of this to be linear. ...