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!