The first time I used the Internet was in 1991, the year the Soviet Union broke apart. I was living in Estonia, one of the Baltic Republics. The only way I could reliably contact my parents in the US was by surreptitiously using the email of a civil servant working with computers. I could write to a neighbor of my parents who had one of the first email accounts in North Carolina at his office.
At the time I had no idea that in 1997, when I moved cross country to San Francisco with my husband, a critical mass had adopted the Internet and I would begin working with some of the first people to create content for it. In 1997, I became the first employee of “415,” named so for the area code. Between 1997 and 2000, this company grew from three of us to, at its peak, 140 employees. We built websites and interactive media for The Library of Congress, the San Francisco Symphony, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Macromedia, McGraw-Hill, Sony, Robert Mondavi and many, many others. What characterizes that time for me was the adrenaline rush of working around the clock in tight teams of young people trying to solve problems.
When I resigned in 2001, I decided to interview some of the first web visionaries while their impressions were still fresh. With the help of four friends, Eun-ha Paek, Ulla Hald, Jacob Mandelsburg and Andy Cowitt, we launched a small, simple dynamic website in August 2001 called “Eat these words.”
For the site, in an attempt to capture the spirit of that time, I interviewed a broad range of people--artists, entrepreneurs, writers, engineers, and other visionaries. Now, six years later, though some of their early observations may seem obvious, at the time, they were revolutionary.
To give just a taste of the energy in the air during that period, I am sharing excerpts from interviews with eight of the thirty people featured. Please note that I include the ages and job titles of my subjects at the time the interview took place in 2001. It would be interesting to see what these renegades are doing now.
- Liisa Ogburn
July 2007
