Andy Baio: Hi, I’m Andy Baio. I’m a writer and pro­gram­mer in Portland, Oregon. 

So, I first dis­cov­ered the Internet after years of being on BBSes. And for me, that first—my only encounter with the net was through text files on BBSes. And it was a weird…you know, Matrix-like thing. I had no idea what it was. Nobody could tell me what the… You know like… Nobody could tell you what the Internet was, you had to expe­ri­ence it for your­self. And I was read­ing things like like Zen and the Art of the Internet try­ing to piece togeth­er what does the—what is this thing? There’s this mas­sive net­work. People are able to talk to each oth­er and then publish… 

And then…you know I’d had expe­ri­ence with email, and then with dis­cus­sion forums, but you still don’t get it. And it was­n’t until I was in com­mu­ni­ty col­lege in 1994 that I first saw a brows­er. And what changed was real­iz­ing the pow­er of con­nect­ing all these peo­ple at once and giv­ing them a method pub­lish them­selves. And that’s what explod­ed my mind. 

And I basically…I first encoun­tered the Web through the head librar­i­an at the com­mu­ni­ty col­lege. And he was just excit­ed to tell some­body about it. And I kept hang­ing out with him, and then he gave me access to his com­put­er in his office that had a brows­er and a net con­nec­tion. And this was like basi­cal­ly all of 1995 I spent in that room. Like, I prac­ti­cal­ly had to drop out of school because I was­n’t attend­ing class­es, I was spend­ing my time look­ing at Cool Site the Day, typ­ing in URLs from Wired that I was get­ting from the library, going on suck​.com and look­ing at— Really I think at that point in time I was look­ing at every sin­gle web page every day. That’s what it felt like. I would go to Yahoo’s ​“What’s New” and look at every sin­gle page that was new and added to the index, and try to go to every sin­gle one. I could not get enough of it. 

And it was just this…it was this amaz­ing thing. And then view­ing source and real­iz­ing this was some­thing I could do myself. And teach­ing myself the fun­da­men­tals of HTML. Even though I nev­er real­ly end­ed up pub­lish­ing until after col­lege. It was this just rev­e­la­tion for me. And at the time I was still using BBSes and try­ing to explain to the oth­er peo­ple on there what this was like, and bring­ing pieces of what I’d seen from the Web back to my local BBS and telling peo­ple about it. It was a…it was transformational. 

So, I’m not a par­tic­u­lar­ly nos­tal­gic per­son. I mean I look fond­ly on ear­ly tech. But I am the kind of per­son that just thinks that every­thing is amaz­ing, right now, and is more amaz­ing than it’s ever been. And so the ques­tion of what has been lost is an inter­est­ing one. Because when I think about what’s lost from tech­nol­o­gy, I tend to go back to the BBS era and think you know, I miss the inti­ma­cy and the local angle. You know like, in the BBS era every­body’s kin­da dial­ing into a local board, usu­al­ly with just one or two phone lines. And every­body just by nature of how that worked, it tends to be in a local area. So you can assume that there’s a shared region­al expe­ri­ence. It’s very small. And inti­mate, and that’s some­thing that I was sur­prised it was hard to find on the Web, and still is. 

But then, the ques­tion isn’t real­ly like what was lost from the BBS era, the ques­tion is what was lost from the ear­ly net. And that’s a more dif­fi­cult ques­tion for me. I mean, there’s two things. One is that…while there’s a lot of exper­i­men­ta­tion and things are amaz­ing, there’s a… I can’t help but feel that there’s a bit of a weird­ness that is miss­ing now. You know, it’s well-established what the Web is and what it can used for. And there was a time where peo­ple were just throw­ing things at the wall con­stant­ly and you did­n’t know what was gonna stick. And that was was interesting. 

But the oth­er that’s I think more impor­tant to me is own­er­ship. You know, I’ve always been a big pro­po­nent for own­ing your work, and own­ing your place on the Web. And kind of carv­ing out a space where you can exper­i­ment and where you know that that’s gonna be around for a long time. You know like the old cre­do that cool URLs nev­er die, if you’ve ever heard that—but like I don’t like sites that dis­ap­pear from the Web and take down a lot­ta his­to­ry with it. And this is why it’s so painful for me to have on my port­fo­lio that I worked at Yahoo, because they’ve real­ly been the— They’ve destroyed more his­to­ry than any com­pa­ny, from Delicious and GeoCities on. 

But there’s some­thing to be said for your own space and your own site. And while the sac­ri­fice is ease of use and con­ve­nience, and— So you’re using these new plat­forms which is awe­some, and it’s great that it’s as democ­ra­tiz­ing as it is and that every­body’s using it. But the the sac­ri­fice is own­er­ship and access to your own work. You know, you look at Twitter and only now are they giv­ing you lim­it­ed access to your own archives, and how long peo­ple were…just okay with that kind of makes me sad.