September 2, 1993 is my first recorded post about the web, asking a question answered by Marc Andreesen.
As backstory, I was a Navy officer waiting around to start flight school. I was part of the “Top Gun” generation: in 1986, lots of silly young men go watch Top Gun, then four years later the Navy has an incredible surplus of pilots. Great foresight there, Navy. For over a year I got paid to go shark fishing in Pensacola, which really was as awesome as it sounds. Thanks, taxpayers!
Ultimately my eyesight went over the allowed limit before my start date arrived, so I had to find something else to do in early 1992. As it turns out, Pensacola was home to the “Navy Internet Manager”. I transferred over to that group with a task of getting some valuable services onto that crazy Internet thing. Email, telnet, DNS, etc. Then gopher. Then the big argument. gopher+ versus this new WWW thing.
The guy in the cubicle next to me ran the navy.mil DNS domain. I vividly remember, in early 1993, rolling my chair around the partition wall and asking for http://www.navy.mil. “What’s that?” he asked. Hilarity ensues. I’ll talk about my experience with that in another post next month.
Chatterbox, Reloaded 
September 5, 2013 at 4:47 am |
Did you go through AOCS at Pensacola? I was class 06-86, we graduated around March of ’86 and started around the time the World Series was played in ’85. I don’t recognize you, but we might have been there at the same time.
September 5, 2013 at 10:43 am |
Hi Carl, thanks for the note. I did NROTC at Florida and so I was commissioned when I got to Pcola. (Go in the Navy to see the world, live in the same town I was born and where my parents lived.) I was a stash ensign, sitting around NAMI waiting for a little over a year to start.
October 15, 2013 at 7:40 pm |
“Top Gun generation” Boy Ev. Those were the days … and yes, the shark was good eat’n.