When I consider my age in “Internet years”, it feels like I’ve been around for quite a while. I graduated High School in 1974 and college in 1978. Back then, the Internet was something only the grad students in the Computer Science Dept even knew about and email was still considered experimental. We had phones back then, of course, but when I moved to the Left Coast after graduation, the only affordable way to stay in touch with old friends was by what the “connected generation” now refers to as “snail mail”. Needless to say, I’ve since lost track of many of my old friends from school. Same with my co-workers from the first half dozen or so jobs I had.
When I first put up my personal website in 1995 and established my own vanity domain some five years later, I realized that one of the main reasons I wanted a personal website, beyond it simply being a “cool” thing to do, was that I was establishing a beacon via which I hoped to re-establish communication with long-lost friends with whom I had lost touch through my own laziness and poor archival skills (in other words, in many cases I simply lost their addresses).
And the ploy seemed to work. Over the last 9 years or so I’ve had quite a few old acquaintances look me up on Google (or one of the many 3rd-world search engines out there) and drop me a note saying: “Hi… remember me? How’s it going”. Of course, in many cases the conversation only lasted until the civil greetings had been exhausted, as we no longer had enough common experience to keep the dialog going. In some cases, things continued on, albeit in the background. In at least one case, the other person and I had drifted so far apart in our viewpoints that, had we met in person at a party, there would have been a very real danger of a fist-fight breaking out.
Continue reading
