I have been in this Web business for more than 15 years. I still remember the beginning of it. The first Web site I designed, the first Internet access centre, etc.

One of my clients at the time had just received a grant to set-up an access center. At first the plan was to connect through a 28.8 baud modem. Slow, but reliable, but our local TV cable company was just starting to offer cable connection, so I phoned them immediately to get them to install a cable modem. It was still something new for them and they didn't quite know what they were doing. I remember the time, this is when the first  iMac started to sell. At this time people didn't know about routers. It was not possible to buy one at Staples or anywhere else. I had to search the Internet to find out how I could share the connection as I needed to have 4 computers using one IP address. The solution at the time was to use soft routing. I configured a computer  (a Mac 4400) with two ethernet cards to be able to share the connection. I was also running on that computer software to host a few Websites (good thing I had a static address). Not at all a good solution. The soft router was okay but it needed to be restarted once in a while. As for Web sites hosted on the server they were very slow and down 20% of the time as I needed to drive to the building every time the server would crash to restart it.

In these days we didn't talk about Facebook, Google or Youtube an the browser that everyone used was Netscape. Internet Explorer was just starting but everyone was still using Netscape.

I designed a lot of Web sites during that time and every site would take me up to 50 - 60 hours to design. Today I can design something equivalent in less than a day. Yes we did a lot of progress in just a few years.

I learned a lot about the Internet and I am still learning today. Things have changed. Videos are very popular today (thanks to broadband). Social networking is hot, and you can find answer to almost all your questions on the Web. Is there anyone out there still using Altavista?Do you know that it was at one time the best search engine on the Web. Altavista  is now part of Yahoo which is doing everything possible to keep its part of the market.

In less than 15 years, we saw so many changes on the Web that it makes you wonder what is going to happen next. Who knows maybe another search engine will take over Google or something else will replace Facebook. It happened before!….