It was 16 years ago today that I was in my lab for Computer Science 2772, a second year level computer course when our prof said "pick something you love, because you are going to be spending a lot of time with it". That was the start of my webpage project for the course. It of course was the beginnings of U2wanderer.org.
I was home over Christmas and I found my old notes from that course while I was there. Detailed notes about < blink > tags and why they should not be used. Notes about colours. How to embed photos. It was pretty simplistic by todays webpage standards, but little did that prof know...I certainly did spend a lot of time with it.
It wasn't viewable on the web until late in that term. I borrowed some webspace from the Byrd Polar Research group at Ohio State University, and instead of submitting my final project on a floppy disc like everyone else I submitted a beautiful laminated sheet that had the URL on it. My prof was amazed. This was before most universities would give out free webspace to students. In 1996 I moved the page to my university server at my new university, where it stayed for 3 years. Mostly just a links page, and some lists of my collection. It spent time at Geocities, and Xoom, and finally at u2.org with my friend Paul. u2.org became u2universe.com, and u2wanderer.org was born.
Kind of fun looking back on it all when i was home at Christmas. And although it's been in a bit of a lull lately, we're still here, we're still planning things far bigger than we ever acccomplish, and we look forward to the next 16 years.
Pretty crazy stuff. :-)