Between Thanksgiving 1993 and early 1994 my father and I built for me a wooden desk, modeled after wooden teacher’s desks. We used cherry as the primary wood. The desk has two drawer stacks, and a top roughly 60 x 36 inches. It’s beautiful and functional, and I still have this desk and use it every day.
The reason for the desk, in 1994, was for my first PC. My employer at the time offered an interest free loan for the purchase of a personal computer, which you paid back over 24 months. I bought a Gateway 2000 486SX, with a 170 MB hard drive, and a 15 inch monitor. The whole thing was in the neighborhood of $3000. Hence the need for a loan to buy it.
About that time America Online was “The” thing. I got a hold of one of the 3.5” floppies and went online. Somewhere in there I learned about HTML and creating webpages. There was a local, small ISP called “Five Guys Internet”, or fgi.net. I signed up and had my own webpage. I think the URL was http://fgi.net/~mnichols. It isn’t on the Internet Wayback Machine.
By 1996 I was ready to have my own domain. I was one of the first personal domains the FGI folks had set up. The set of available top level domains was rather limited. I managed to get zanshin.net. The day the domain was registered in my name was February 20, 1996. Thirty years ago today.