I remember the first time I realised the full potential of web searching. In the late 1990s I met a guy on a course who was a specialist consultant on software testing. A few months later we realised this would be useful for my company, but all I knew was the guy’s name. We racked our brains as to how to contact him—if I’d known where he lived we would have gone to the library and looked him up in the relevant city’s phone book!
Then someone had the bright idea to try typing his name into a search engine (probably Alta Vista back then.) Lo and behold, up came some rudimentary web page he’d created for himself, including his email address. We sent an email to it, and within hours got a reply saying he was in Texas at the moment (we were in London) but would be back in the UK soon and would get in touch.
This was miraculous. We could now track down and communicate with someone anywhere in the world, given only their name.
I remember the first time I realised the full potential of web searching. In the late 1990s I met a guy on a course who was a specialist consultant on software testing. A few months later we realised this would be useful for my company, but all I knew was the guy’s name. We racked our brains as to how to contact him—if I’d known where he lived we would have gone to the library and looked him up in the relevant city’s phone book!
Then someone had the bright idea to try typing his name into a search engine (probably Alta Vista back then.) Lo and behold, up came some rudimentary web page he’d created for himself, including his email address. We sent an email to it, and within hours got a reply saying he was in Texas at the moment (we were in London) but would be back in the UK soon and would get in touch.
This was miraculous. We could now track down and communicate with someone anywhere in the world, given only their name.
Wow, that’s a great story.