Where were you when?

Dan Klyn tagged me for this trip down memory lane. Let's see what I can dig up. He says limit this to your worklife, which is hard, but I'll try the best I can.

One year ago I was at Socialtext. I wasn't sleeping well, in part because of the needed attentions of a new baby (Jonathan).

Five years ago, Cisco Systems was dealing with the indigestion of a $2.2 billion mountain of excess inventory and about 8500 excess employees. The day I left I started the Cisco Alumni Association. What went wrong at Cisco? Fortunately I had someone to keep me company, a new baby (Saul).

Ten years ago, I worked for First Virtual Holdings. It's the pre-blog era, so I don't have an accounting down to the date for that year, but the highlight of the year was a trip to Dubai, UAE for ARABANK '96. I gave a presentation on The Perils and Pitfalls of Practical Cybercommerce to an audience made up primarily of people in Islamic banking. The falafel restaurant I visited there could have been transplanted to Ann Arbor and not been at all out of place.

Fifteen years ago, there was a Sun 3/50 and a couple of Telebit Trailblazer modems in the basement of a house in Ann Arbor which was the first version of MSEN. I was a regular on a lot of Usenet newsgroups, and moderated comp.archives. MSEN owes its existence to downtown Ann Arbor coffee shops. I was just winding down a stint at OTA Limited Partnership, an options trading company.

Twenty years ago, I was at the U of Michigan, organizing the Student Conferencing Project and working for the computing center on the PC1 project collecting MS-DOS freeware from the various nooks and crannies of BBS systems, a TOPS-20 machine on an Army missle range, and floppies from the local user groups.

Not entirely coincidentally, I'm back working at the U of Michigan, now at the School of Information working with the Community Information Corps.

I'd like to pass this idea on to Dan Cooney, Enoch Choi , and Marnie Webb.

Comments

[enoch choi]

i've followed your yellow brick meme... i mean road...

http://www.enochchoi.com/thoughts/archives/002106.html