February 1998

One of my goals in having http://billslater.com is to share some of the passions and special things about my life, and to celebrate my unique combination of interests in a way that will help enlighten, fascinate, and educate people. I also love to meet new people and make new friends, and the Internet has certainly helped in that regard. Folks, we are living in an age of electronic and technological miracles, and I can't tell you how excited I am to teach this, share this, and to participate in it as a web publisher / webmaster. I attended a Digital Equipment Corporation (now a part of Compaq Computer Corporation) database conference in Nashua, NH in January 1991. There, some of the presenters predicted that the type of connectivity and interoperability which is now common on the Internet and the World Wide Web, was going to be designed, created and worked on by us, by our children, and completed by our grandchildren. Digital's grand vision was called "the Information Network." I was totally fascinated by this idea because I realized that it would change the world - for the better. My only hope was that I would live long enough to see it happen. The very same year (1991), Dr. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and HTTP at CERN in Switzerland in order to enable the ease of sharing of ideas in his papers and those of his colleagues. He called it "the World Wide Web." About two years later, some bright students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign got together and created Mosaic, the world's first popular GUI browser. It caused the Internet population to grow about 381,000% that year because the browser was FREE and it made the Internet simple and easy to use. I discovered the web for myself in December 1993. Within two to three years from that conference I attended in January 1991, Berners-Lee and the young engineers from UIUC had laid the groundwork to have the type of interoperability which Digital thought would take 35 to 40 years to complete. That's something of a miracle, is it not? Indeed, thanks to the capabilities the web gives us, we are living in the most exciting times in the entire history of the Human Race on this planet.

In May 1996, I developed my first version of this web site and uploaded it to CompuServe. Then later there was a version located in a user area at XSITE, my Internet Service Provider in Chicago. Then in late September 1997, I purchased my own domain name through the InterNIC, and got it hosted at XSITE. Then I migrated the contents of both web sites to http://billslater.com and have been publishing stuff at this web site since September 26, 1997.

Shortly after I got my own domain name, XSITE provided me with a link which shows published reports of the access activity on http://billslater.com. The URL for that report, which you can view for yourself is at: http://billslater.com/stats/www.billslater.com.html.

Anyway, for months I have tracked the progress of the web hits here on this site, and was amazed to find that in mid-December 1997, that the hit count was all the way up to 40,000. Now if the hits continue at their present rate, during the week of Feb. 6, I will go over the 100,000 hit mark point. At the present rate, I expect the next 100,000 to occur about 10 weeks from February 6, 1998. This is especially surprising because I don't do any advertising except on business cards and a baseball cap (see http://www.capfactory.com) I had created with my web site URL on it.

So I am grateful for all the visitors who stop by and visit various pages on my web site. I am planning even bigger and better things for the future. If you have comments, questions, and/or suggestions, please e-mail me or leave them in my GuestBook.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing in the excitement. Happy web surfing!!!

Your friend in cyberspace,

Bill Slater

Webmaster of http://billslater.com

e-mail me: slater@xsite.net