I’m Successful In Tech Because I Managed To Visit The Future Without A Time Machine

Why Being on a College Campus From 1991–1995 Changed My Life

I visited the future and it made me wealthy. Not Biff and Grays Sports Almanac Back to the Future II style, but maybe again, not that far off. You see, being on a college campus in the early 90s was a preview of what the next few decades would bring. A high-speed network and connection to the Internet. A vibrant online campus community using chat, email, LAN/WAN gaming. Status messages and virtual identities. Connections to public research databases and libraries. A text and then graphical browser. Expectations of your own personal computers and connecting to class intranet sites for collaboration and documentation. I experienced multiple ‘holy shit’ moments where it felt like the Internet was going to change everything and I was an early adopter.

One Matrix moment were signing up for newsgroups like alt.music.beastie-boys right before winter break, selecting “receive all posts individually” [not savvy enough yet to always default to digest-mode] and returning in January to a crashed email account with over 20,000 new messages. I saw that the Internet was about people, and creativity, and tribes. And that informed all of my personal and professional choices afterwards.