I manifested digitally in the BBS MUDs and MOOs of 1983. My meatware avatar, Gary Starkweather, a family man, was at that time mixing with an offshoot of the original Homebrew Club that met at Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto, CA. It was focused on the Commodore Pet, Vic 20, and eventually C-64 personal computers. Soon he was a Commodore Lorraine (pre-release Amiga ) developer, full-time programming student, and one-time President of the First Amiga User Group (FAUG). He wrote the first ever Fractal-Based Energy Weapon in a computer game for Mike Wallace’s Return To Atlantis.
Then came the Internet… Blam!
ARPAnet – precursor to the Internet – was widely used in Palo Alto in the late 80’s because Stanford, SLAC, SRI, Xerox PARC and others were instrumental in its development. It was great fun to be able to search remote databases and archives using Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and WAIS but it was slow and tedious and the amount of data exposed to the Internet was small.
In 1991 Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented a hypertext based tool he dubbed the World Wide Web which allowed resources of any sort to be reachable on ‘Web Pages’ by entering WWW on the Command Line. The World Wide Web was a giant step for accessing information on the Internet even then.
Shortly after that I used the first web browser, Lynx, to use the web which was still text only, but much more capable.
On April 22, 1993 Marc Andreessen, at U of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic – a browser unlike anything seen before. Mosaic could display graphics, sounds, and video on a web page. It was awesome.
Mosaic became Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer ended Netscape – and what was Netscape became Firefox – and now Chrome and Edge are trying to finish off Firefox… The saga is ongoing.
By 1994 I had a website with a grey background (all web sites did back then) and soon I had my first community site and great hopes for this wonderful tool.
As my RL life progressed, I became more realized in VR. I arrived in Second Life in 2004 or so and in OpenSim several years later. In 2016 I traveled to No Man’s Sky where I still roam and explore today.
Now, I also curate this blog and add entries to my gallery at StarkyRubble.com