Interview of Julian Egelstaff (cont')

RG: That's amazing!!

Now, the web stuff sort of hung around and grew in everyone's consciousness for the next couple years. At the time, it was impossible to find anything on it. With gopher and telnet, which were the two big navigation tools at the time, you've got to understand, you just jump directly to a site, like another university or something, and there you are, and there's no hyperlinks all over the place, like on the web, it was much more limited, but focused. With the massive interconnectivity of the web, it was just a big morass and getting your bearings was next to impossible. That changed later, but we'll get to that.

RG: Interesting...

JE: Anyway, the first web development I did was my résumé. I did that in, gees, it must have been spring 1996. Quite a wait for the web to get big. Barbara and I were living with a friend of ours in our fourth year. That was the first term (fall 1995), and then in spring 1996 Barbara went off to England on an exchange, and Geoff and I--he was a computer science student--were sharing this place. He had a graphical web connection and all kinds of cool stuff. I was still plunking away with a 2400 baud modem and the text based interface of the Freenet, and a simpler text based school system called CHAT that had cropped up in the meantime. I was looking for a job while Barbara was on exchange. It was my last year and I had to get a job. The web was the next big thing, and the financial pressure was on now, so one day, using the school CHAT system, which had a great little tutorial on HTML, I worked away at creating a really, really simple page. After I had figured out there was nothing to it, it wasn't difficult to get my resume online, though truth be told, it was a pretty awful web page, but for the time it was adequate and I could pass the URL to prospective employers and it had a reasonable impressiveness factor.

That same semester I was taking a new course at the Journalism school (my degree is Bachelor of Journalism) on Internet reporting techniques. I had run into a friend of mine, Leanne, on campus way back in September and she told me about this neat new course that wasn't in the calendar. Well, with it being about the 'net, I was all over that. So I went and registered for it right away. Come January, here I am in this course. Now, because I had been learning about this stuff anyway, I knew a lot about the things people were talking about like listservs and stuff, but I still learned a thing or two, and got a job out of it.

The major thing I learned was about AltaVista. AltaVista went live in December 1995. This course started in Jan. 96. So, here I am in class one day in January, and one of the profs mentions AltaVista, tells us to go to this address he writes on the board. We all had terminals in the class, so off we go. Well, at that time AltaVista had something like 10 million pages, or something like that. Next to nothing by today's standards, but remember that morass I talked about well, here was an absolutely incredible tool to cut through it. I was amazed, literally dumbstruck. I remember sending e-mail to Barbara and other people I knew and proclaiming that this was the beginning of a new era--that all of humanity was now indexed and accessible to everyone. It was incredible to be able to type in stuff--queries on just about anything--and in seconds get a search result from 10 MILLION! pages! Incredible!

*** RG cuts and pastes with blazing speed...

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