Sandhill, the Early Days

1996, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Everybody who made any money in the early days at Microsoft was retiring and you never knew where you’d find them. The Arizona house? The Asheville place? That new cozy condo-apartment in the mid sixties on the West side? The Corporate Cobolistas were dropping out fast too. Why re-tool when you can take your thirty years of the same year’s worth of experience and buy a double-wide behind the fence off US 27 in a gorgeous gated community near Ocala. I was thinking of joining them. At that time I had no skillz to brag about, no warez with my name on them. I wouldn’t even have known how to mail-bomb you if pissed me off. But I always did seem to have a nose for news, and when young Jeremy showed up one evening at a local watering hole and joined me later at Sandhill WHQ I experienced a great opening outward.

I don’t remember what the Singapore platform was built on. One of those insecticidal sounding 4GLs that were all the rage, I guess… Informix, Sybase? Who knows. Jeremy had a day job, and whatever they were running there on the day shift, we were running at sandhill in the night. It was immediately clear to me that Jeremy was on to something and that I’d be able to steal leverage his work. In exchange, he would benefit from my years of industry experience.

In those days everybody was nicking a little bit of their employer’s server space to stash an online journal, a collection of poetry, recipes, whatever. We called these collections “world wide web logs,” which was a clumsy name at best. It was Jeremy’s genius to see that if we banked these in a database and wrapped them in a little HTML upon withdrawal, we could manage the storage, the retrieval, and the display of these awkwardly named collections. Jeremy was productizing before we even had the code written. He would pace back and forth sort of mumbling until finally his zit sprinkled boyish phiz split in a big grin and he looked straight at me and practically shouted: “Webbles!” And that’s where the name came from. It was obvious that we were onto something, but who would have dreamed that we’d get our own entry in Merriam Webster. Webbles!

We’ll be celebrating those little insights from 1996 and all the work that followed on New Years Eve Day, right here at Listics! I hope you can join us. I especially hope that Jeremy can get some time off from his marketing gig and put in an appearance. Don’t be a stranger! (Or don’t be any stranger than you are, I guess).