Friday, January 29, 2010

eBrew Garners Proclamation

Special thanks to NH Speaker of the House Terie Norelli, who took me up on my invitation to attend our 11th anniversary eBrew earlier this month.  Even better, she saw fit to honor us with an official proclamation!

Monday, January 25, 2010

Dynamic Internet now offers virtual server hosting

In keeping with the current trend toward virtualization across the IT spectrum, Dynamic Internet of Salem -- my web host of choice -- is now offering virtual server hosting. This could be an attractive (and cost-saving) option for small businesses considering co-location or dedicated hosting. Learn more about virtual private servers on Wikipedia and give James a call for more information and pricing options.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

eBrew - Special 11th Anniversary Edition!

In January 1999, a handful of local tech businesspeople had lunch at the Portsmouth Brewery. There we hatched the idea for a loose organization that would promote technology business development in the Seacoast area. And I thought it would be neat if we could all get together for a beer after work, say once a month, and chat about the rapidly-changing industry that we were helping to shape (i.e., namely, the Internet). Thus, we dubbed the Seacoast the "e-Coast" and our monthly get-together the "e-Brew."

As our 11th anniversary of this occasion occurs tomorrow, it strikes me just how long ago that really was. I always say the Internet moves not in years but in quarters, so like one calendar year equals 7 dog years, one calendar year equals 4 Internet years. So that's 44 years ago! Still not convinced? Then consider the following. At the time of the first eBrew....
  • Bill Clinton was president.
  • Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Kenneth Starr were household names.
  • Jeanne Shaheen was governor.
  • We used Yahoo! to search for stuff on the web. Or Alta-Vista. Or Lycos. Or even AOL.
  • I was still happily (or so I thought) married. My daughter was 2. My future fiance was 19.
  • Windows 98 sucked.
  • iMacs came in pretty colors. I was still using my Mac Quadra 650; I would buy my graphite special edition iMac that December.
  • I had started at this little company called Visualink Technologies; we made CD-ROMs and web sites.
  • We were scared of Y2K.
  • We were excited about Star Wars Episode 1: the Phantom Menace.
  • My ISP was Ultranet.
  • Modems were loud.
  • Mark McGwire had broken the single-season home-run record and was still a hero.
  • The Dow broke 10,000. And then 11,000. And NASDAQ was starting to go crazy. Everybody was buying stocks!
  • We didn't have to take our shoes off to get onto a plane.
  • The Twin Towers still stood.
Yep, it was a long, long time ago, wasn't it? What do you remember from January 1999? Where were you?

See you upstairs at the Press Room!