Hey, just noticed this thread!

There is a lot to say, and I"m not sure where to begin. But I was (as I wrote in my original story) one of the editors of the MIT student newspaper. We had a lot of fun, and some great computers. And every so often, someone would come by and ask to search through our archives.

Now, our "great computers" were Atex systems for typesetting and layout, based (I think) on PDPs of some sort. So to search through the archives meant loading a "disk pack," which is a laughably large hard disk that you had to put into the machine or take off of it. Just searching through the 100+ years of the newspaper's archives was a huge task.

At some point, we figured out how to get the information from Atex onto a more modern computer. And I set up the index, for my undergrad thesis, to be accessible on the Internet (not the Web). But the interface was clunky, and while it was better than before, the search was far from perfect.

So it was really great timing when Jeremy Hylton (now of Python/Google) went to that talk. We turned off my thesis software, turned on a Web site, and set up a simple search to work on our Web site. The thing is, while this was a great feature, there was one missing component -- users. So we actually took out large "house ads" (i.e., advertisements that the newspaper takes out itself, rather than selling to advertisers) telling people how to get a browser, what a URL was, how to enter the URL into a browser... all so that they could search the newspaper archives.

This was in early 1993, and I was still living in Boston at the time. A few months later, I went to a computer show, in which someone was showing off Web authoring tools. He asked who had a Web site, and I was the only one to raise my hand. I think that it just started at that point to become known among the technological elites, but the "elite" part meant that you had ever browsed the Web, not that you created sites yourself.

Another quick anecdote: When we set up the newspaper's Web site, we wanted people to be able to contact us. HTML forms had just been invented, as had the CGI protocol. So I hacked together a little program that took the contents of a form and sent it, via e-mail, to our administrators. I called it form-mail, and it was written in Perl, and all was great... until a few years later, when someone named "Matt" took it, removed my name, added his, took out all of the security features I had put in, and then made it famous as part of "Matt's Script Archive," which was the bane of Perl programmers' existence for years.

I seem to have lost the e-mail exchange that I had with him at the time, but when I told him that you cannot just remove someone else's name from GPL'ed code, he claimed to be scared, and then never did anything about it. Which is just as well, given that he so sullied the name of my program that I'm happy to give him the credit for all subsequent versions.

One last point: There wasn't any CGI.pm, or other Perl module to do Web stuff, back then. So I wrote my own code to decode data from POST-submitted forms. If you ever see the Perl code "for $pair in @pairs", then it's almost certainly copied from the code that I wrote in that first form-mail program, oh-so-many years ago.

Fun stuff, indeed!