> The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.
When I started college, the WWW was quite new. I quickly learned to view pages with NCSA Mosaic at the CIP pool, but had no clue at all how all of this worked. I was determined to find out, though.
I read somewhere that you needed a patchy server to make your own pages. So I googled Apache on Altavista, was briefly surprised that the first hit wasn't about the tribe, and carefully followed all the instructions without knowing what I did.
After a while I could see my test page in Mosaic and happily went home. It was late already, I was tired, so I pondered if I should boot my computer and dial-in to find out if I could see my page from home as well.
I did not understand much, but I figured, if I could view the page from home, everyone in the whole world must be able to see it.
This thought left me no peace, so I did it and to my biggest surprise it actually worked![1]
I didn't sleep much that night. Having grown up in a rural place without even a library, this absolutely rocked my world.
About two weeks later I received a notice from the university, that I wasn't allowed to run services on university resources without permission, so I had to shut it down. But apart from that, nothing bad happened, I am very glad they reacted reasonably.
[1] Our computers had public IPs and firewalls were yet to come.
Not your core point, but it is fun to remember that NAT wasn't always a thing, and many networks just PCs with public internet addresses and no firewalls. Even NetBIOS worked over the plain Internet back then. You could just \\x.x.x.x\c$ and it would work a decent percentage of the time.
When I started college, the WWW was quite new. I quickly learned to view pages with NCSA Mosaic at the CIP pool, but had no clue at all how all of this worked. I was determined to find out, though.
I read somewhere that you needed a patchy server to make your own pages. So I googled Apache on Altavista, was briefly surprised that the first hit wasn't about the tribe, and carefully followed all the instructions without knowing what I did.
After a while I could see my test page in Mosaic and happily went home. It was late already, I was tired, so I pondered if I should boot my computer and dial-in to find out if I could see my page from home as well.
I did not understand much, but I figured, if I could view the page from home, everyone in the whole world must be able to see it.
This thought left me no peace, so I did it and to my biggest surprise it actually worked![1]
I didn't sleep much that night. Having grown up in a rural place without even a library, this absolutely rocked my world.
About two weeks later I received a notice from the university, that I wasn't allowed to run services on university resources without permission, so I had to shut it down. But apart from that, nothing bad happened, I am very glad they reacted reasonably.
[1] Our computers had public IPs and firewalls were yet to come.