An anniversary

Yesterday was Pi Day! It was also the 25th anniversary of the first time I ever published my own “home page” under the name of Jarrett House North.

I started the site because I felt like I was behind and wanted to catch up. I had joined American Management Systems out of college, a newly minted BS in Physics with no marketable skills. I learned to program there, but I was developing enterprise software, back when that meant client-server instead of cloud. I saw what was happening in the dot-com era and wanted a piece of that excitement. I figured I could start with flexing one of my dormant muscles, my writing, and combining it with my small knowledge of the web.

I had been reading Dave Winer’s DaveNet email newsletter for some time, and he was in the middle of helping to invent blogging—or at least blogging software. He had written a module for his object database that translated nodes of the object outline into web pages. It was part of something called Aretha, a free release of the Frontier software that was the evolution of what Dave had written as a platform level scripting tool for the Mac. I downloaded Dave’s free version and created a web pages in the outliner, and ran it on my Mac. I was one of the first people in my neighborhood with a cable modem, so I more or less permanently claimed an IP address (their DHCP server didn’t play nice with my Mac’s Open Transport networking stack). For about a year you could find my content there, if you knew where to look (http://209.8.158.74, back in the day).

Then we moved to Cambridge so I could attend grad school. Dave opened up a hosted blogging solution based on his Frontier platform at editthispage.com. The software had evolved to something called Manila—more powerful, and you could edit in the browser instead of the object database. I moved my site’s content there, but for a long time it was just the equivalent of a static page. I posted some vacation photos there and the occasional note, but that was it.

When I spent the summer in Seattle for my b-school internship at Microsoft, I started writing something every day—specifically, on June 11, 2001. And, with the exception of a few hiatuses here and there, I haven’t really ever stopped since. So I date my blogaversary to June 11, but it all really started over a year before, 25 years ago.