I have been on and around the internet since my days in college in the early early 90’s. I still remember dial into my college’s computer networks using my phone line and a modem to get assignments from my professor in one of my business courses. They have chat boards back then too for college students. One of the most popular one I visited at the time was call ISCA.edu (I hope I have it right..it is located in Iowa University). I found a few pen pals on this board to exchange post cards. I was into collecting post cards at the time. Of course, there were other on line resource at the time too, such as, American Online, ICQ, Gopher, and etc.
I don’t know when colleges started having internet access. But back in my High School years, my cousins introduced me to BBS (Bulletin Board System). Basically, it’s an electronic board that you can dial in through a phone line to chat, post comments and download commercial and free computer games. These boards were run by some geeky guys either inside his room or in his parent’s garage. We even meet up for a bowling tournament called “Battle of the Boards”. My cousin and I were second place in one of these tournaments. I think that was probably my only trophy that I have ever received in my entire life. Oh, and the other, I got lucky and got myself a trophy wife. =)
Years ago, I created my very first web pages through Geo Cities, the company which had since been bought out by Yahoo. I remember pulling a few all-nighters to put my resume and a few of my friends resumes on line. Yes, you guess it! I was thinking of creating my own I.T. recruiting/employment agency. Needless to say, I abandoned the project after a few days and moved on to the next “get-rich-quick” idea.
In the midst of the Great Recession around Sept/ Oct of 2008, I was sub-contracting for IBM at the time and I have been there for years. Things were slowing down for a few months by then, and one of our fellow programmer were already let go. I received a call from my friend, a project lead from Perrot Systems. He asked me if I was interested in working on a 1-year project for him. In retrospect, I should have taken the job. Because, things really took a bad turn a few months later.
I registered my very first domain name in the summer of 2008 with GoDaddy.com after corresponded with a kid on line for a couple of times, who was kind enough to give me a few pointers on creating web sites. I ran across him on line while he was peddling to sell one of his websites. I remember around 2005, we upgraded all of our pc and get new laptops with Dell through a bargain site called Deals2Buy.com. I love browsing this site and have always wanted to create something just like it. With the little html that I know, I have grand plans to clone a web site to have similar functionality and presentation like Deals2Buy.com.
Here is version 1.0 of my very first web site, BargainsAddict.com. Don’t laugh. I worked my ass off to get it up and running. I will continue on my next post to tell you the improvements I made to the site.
and Deals2Buy.com looks like this:
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