I found my earliest USENET post. November 2, 1994, comp.infosystems.www.misc. I was not a student at UT Austin. I worked there, and the job came with access to the Student Microcomputer Facility. Everyone called it SMURF. The message ID still says smf-d11. That room had fast internet while the internet was still being figured out, and I spent a lot of time in it.

The idea was a home page with a form. You fill it out, some magic happens, and it spits out the email address of someone far away in another country. A pen pal machine. I asked the newsgroup for help because, in my words, I was a liberal arts kind of guy with no high tech skills.

Read it again. A profile form. A matching step. A connection to a stranger somewhere else on the planet. That is the pitch for every social network that came after. Friendster launched in 2002. MySpace in 2003. Facebook in February 2004, nine years and three months after this post. Call it a decade.

I was not smart about it. I did not know what CGI was. I signed it "Little Joey with No Familia" and added a PS apologizing for how I talk. But the instinct was right. The interesting thing about the internet was never the documents. It was the people on the other end.

The dated reference

The title was "Big Blue Marble in Space." That is a reference to a PBS kids show from the 1970s. Big Blue Marble showed kids in other countries living their lives, and at the end of every episode it invited you to write in and get a pen pal overseas. Mail a letter, wait a few weeks, get a friend in Japan.

So the idea was not even mine. I was trying to rebuild a 1974 television pen pal program as a web form. By 1994 the show was already twenty years old. Nobody on comp.infosystems.www.misc got the joke. Fifty years later, I still think it was a good one.

What else was in the archive

Six weeks later I was on rec.arts.disney asking for Disney checks for my little brother's Christmas. First time in the newsgroup, posting from a SLIP connection at UT with WinVN 0.90.4. A man named Jim wrote back to say they were only for cast members. That is the whole internet in one thread. Ask a question, a stranger answers, nobody gets paid.

Five months after saying I had no high tech skills, I was in comp.infosystems.www.announce with a press release. The UT Graduate School of Business Executive Education office had a new homepage, and it was designed by Joey Janisheck of SforzaVision, a private multimedia firm in Austin. That firm was me and a phone number. The site organized text behind bright jpeg and gif images so readers would not have to wade through endless hypertext. We were very proud of that.

It was also one of the first websites at the University. This was years before Team Web existed, before UT had staff or systems for putting departments online. A business school office wanted a homepage, so a guy from the computer lab built one and issued a press release to a newsgroup.

Then a jump to November 2003 and austin.jobs. WebGazelle, my web shop at the time, needed an ASP.NET developer on a project basis. Austin only. Hourly rate required. The email address is spelled out as "jobs at webgazelle dot com" because spam bots were already scraping the groups. Three months later Facebook went live at Harvard.

Nine years in four posts

Liberal arts guy asking for help. Kid looking for a Christmas present. Freelancer with a press release. Business owner hiring developers. The archive kept every one of them, blurred my email address, and put a paywall on the headers.

I never built the pen pal form. Somebody else built it, added photos and a news feed, and it is now worth a trillion dollars. I got the Executive Education homepage.

Here is the song. The show is fifty years old, the reference was already dated in 1994, and I would still sign up for a pen pal.