Last night in our ECI831 session, the Well was mentioned. I was a lurking member of the Well many years ago. In SmartMobs, Howard Rheingold talked about the Well, he was one of the founding fathers.
There were actually 3 little excerpts in his book, that I was a part of. Although it made me initially feel very old…I realized that all three of these CONNECTIONS help to evolve me to who I am today.
The second except is when he talks about DARPA, I worked at Florida State University Supercomputer Computational Research Institute. This was one of 5 universities that DARPA gave supercomputers to. This was also my first introduction to the internet (before the WWW). I created mostly physics papers in TEX, which is to me, is the mother of HTML, CSS, etc. SCRI does not have a Connection Machine now, and the program has evolved into a Department of Scientific Computing.
The third except is when he talked about a whole audience at Siggraph playing pong together. Again, I went to that conference in Las Vegas because FSU sent me there.
Now, I know that I am proud to have been a part of all of this. I don’t think anyone at that time thought that the WWW would evolve into what it is today. But I am certainly glad that after two decades, I am still learning because of it.
Sail's Pedagogy 