All good things come to an end. Everything changes in one way or another. That’s just how life is. That constant sense of change is why I call our humanness a situation, not a condition.
At some point, humans hunted the very last mammoth. Built the last active shrine to Inanna. Brushed their fingers against the last nevel harp. Somersaulted for the last time across an enraged bull while their eardrums throbbed with the roar of approving crowds.
The difference between those ancient times and now is that when today’s hunt is but a tasty memory shared over cooking fires, someone can note it online and ask if anyone else has seen one of those beasties lately. Our knowledge grows by the day, and we share information with each other more easily and completely now than we have in the entire prior history of our species.
It wasn’t always like this.
From the ground up to the sky
Nearly thirty years ago, I created my first website.
That wasn’t really possible until the advent of Netscape in 1994. It was a very primitive application, though. Browsing in the sense we do it today just wasn’t a thing. And neither was making a website.
To get a website up, people needed a few very important things:
- They had to know someone at a university. ISPs were still rare in 1995, and few offered website hosting. But universities embraced the internet very quickly. They regularly gave employees and students what we called shell accounts. These were Unix-based command-line accounts similar to Windows’ “users.” Often, those who had these accounts shared access with friends eager to hop onto the information superhighway. The URL would be decidedly unglamorous, like, say, UBC.edu.ca/users/~ccassidy/site/index.html. But nobody really cared. It’s not like search engines were really up to speed yet. That’s what web rings were for. Otherwise, you had to already know where you were going on that highway.
- They had to know how to use Unix and write HTML from scratch. This was not negotiable. Easy PC-based website builders did not exist. A site began with <HTML> and ended with </HTML>, with the fun happening in between. Fancy folks might add Javascript flourishes for fancy tickertape footer text or page counts. Maybe they’d even use frames (ooh la la!).
- Some way to get graphics into a hard drive, unless you wanted a text-only site or found exactly what you needed online. Until the early 2000s, this generally meant taking photos on a regular camera, then getting the results digitized by a regular film development shop onto a CD. The quality was potato, to say the least. I’ve still got many Kodak CDs filled with digitized pictures I took for websites.
That first primitive site I made was more of a proof-of-concept than an actual site. But I will never forget the sheer rush of finishing that first index page and seeing it load on a PC’s browser window.
An instant connection
There’s this very emotional scene in Poltergeist. The mother of a missing little girl cries out to her distressed child. And the girl’s invisible spirit whooshes down the staircase and clean through her mother.
It’s a connection, a contact, so immediate and so intimate that afterward, the mother can even smell her child on her hands, her clothes.
That’s the scene that came to my mind as I marveled at the page. I was the first in my peer group to do this. My friends already knew what the URL would be, and I knew they were looking at it right then.
I felt like a bolt of lightning connected us. Just this brief touch, like the tips of the wings of seabirds brushing those of other birds as they flew. This connection. Whatever it was, I wanted more of it.
Everything changes, but some stuff never will
Since then, I’ve just about always run websites. It got a lot easier very quickly, too. By the end of the 1990s, various companies offered simplified web-building and hosting access. One of the most important at the time was iVillage. I parked oh so many cat pages there!
All around me, websites sprouted up. Anyone who could scrape together shell access, graphics, and homegrown HTML could put up a site about anything under the sun. And that’s just about what happened. Internet 1.0-1.5 was an incredibly wild ride. Later on, LiveJournal and its many imitators, WordPress and Blogger, social media of all stripes, the internet gave millions of people voices—and that feeling of connection.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of connection.
We’re social beasts and always have been. We’re wired to communicate, to share, to learn, to grow. It’s how we went from being hunter-gatherers to building pyramids, steam engines, and space stations. There’s never been a better tool for connection than the internet. I don’t think there ever will be a better one, either, unless we figure out how to communicate telepathically with brain implants.
And let’s face it: Even then, it’ll probably require the internet.
The sky’s still the only limit we have
Thirty years later, I’m a lot closer to the end of my ride than to its beginning. I know that. In those years, I’ve seen so many changes to the internet.
For the past few years, OnlySky has been one of the most welcome of those changes.
I watched as professionals crafted this site from the ground up. Stuff I’ve never been able to do, they did easily. The folks behind the site drew together an incredibly talented pool of writers and journalists (if I may say so myself), too.
Once everything was ready, we set forth with this vision of what a media site could be. What writing could be. What storytelling could be. As a result, my best work has come from my time at OnlySky. I’ll carry those lessons forward.
I still believe wholeheartedly in what OnlySky has accomplished. Its talented writers are heading to different spaces (where I hope they find only the softest of landings), but they aren’t disappearing. And neither am I.
You can find me at RolltoDisbelieve.com, where I currently update twice a week, and on Patreon (where patrons get early access to posts—and where I park audio ‘casts of them). I hope you’ll join me for what comes next.
You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us
– Sappho