10 Years Online

It occured to me a few days ago that the end of 2005 marks my 10th anniversary of being on the real Internet, and also the 10th anniversary of this website.

## Digital Grace ##

I actually started my life online much earlier, in, I think, 1993, when I first bought a modem. I soon ran my own BBS – the _Digital Grace_, named after a Shadowrun short story from issue 47 of _Challenge_ magazine. It never caught on except for a small group of close friends, although I still keep in touch with [Lars](http://vernetzt.org/lars/) who one evening in 1994 logged in and had odd problems with his modem, which would only connect with 9600 bps. Such were the joys of the early days.

_Digital Grace_ served mostly as my gateway to the wider world – first via FidoNet, later via Usenet gateways that sprang up in a number of those networks. In early 1995 or late 1994 a kind anonymous soul signed me up for the AOL Germany Beta test. I wish I had the emails from Back Then, or remembered your name. Whoever you were, you changed my life and my career. Thank you.

## AOL Betatest ##

I had already forgotten pretty much all about it when I received the little packet with the AOL Disk and the log in data. I discovered the AOL content, tried my best to provide feedback (I never liked their greenish original color scheme, but I absolutely hated their German “You Got Mail” sound). My account was free, much to the amazement and envy of my fellow users from the US – who had to pay a small fortune for the use of America On-Line.

I explored near instantaneous emailing and international real time chat. Few people realized that AOL was branching out into other countries. I used the handle “NJeppe”, and people simply assumed the NJ stood for “New Jersey”. One evening, while I was chatting with online friends, a woman came into the chat room, obviously raving mad at me. She called me by my name, and was jealous and accused me of “cheating” on her online.

It turned out that she was engaged to some guy in the local fire brigade, his first name also being Nils she assumed it was me. Seemingly the name is so rare that it never occurred to her that I might be another person.

## The Real Thing ##

AOL led to my first visit in the United States, and it was there that I was first exposed to the “Real Internet”. At first it was a hidden feature you could unlock with modified winsock.dll files (never mind if you don’t understand that bit); later there was a service called GNN which was a subsidiary of AOL if I remember correctly. My host in the US, however, quickly decided to go for “the real thing”, and we went down to a local ISP across the river and signed up. Bluefin Internet actually provided static IPs to their dial up customers – unthinkable today. It was not long after that I began to design my first web page, which I think was online by December 1995.

When I returned to Germany, I also signed up with a local ISP, as the beta phase of AOL ended. The rest, as they say, is history. I got an internship at another ISP in 1997 which then hired me in late 1998. I got my first leased line – a 64KBit ISDN line – and once and for all entered the information age. My website evolved; I first experimented with a “news” feature in around 1999 but never found enough to write about (plus my English wasn’t quite up to the task). I moved over my website to Zope and PHP (at various times), made things more dynamic. I added a real news feature in January 2002, and my own weblog has been a constant part of my website since then.

Since that time, not too much has changed. I still work in the industry. I still talk to more people outside Germany than inside. I couldn’t imagine life anymore without virtually the whole world at my fingertips.

I’m wondering what the next 10 years bring. Let’s see if I’ll be still running this weblog then…