September 27, 1994. I was sitting in Kilroy’s Diner in the now long-dead Nevada Club in downtown Reno where the Harrah’s Plaza now stands reading the latest issue of Wired Magazine. Issue 2.10 to be exact. The October issue. The Spew Issue. Pink. Orange.
Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click - they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another.
Click. It clicked with me. My career chasing the multi-property player tracking systems for casino marketing was over. My sweet executive office on the top floor of the Harolds Club was about to be demolished. I was about to be sentenced to the bowels of the third floor of Fitzgeralds with no windows and a never-ending supply of HVAC direct deposited second-hand smoke to my 8×8 office where I would manage 22-less employees.
Yeah, I know it’s boring of me to send you plain old Text like this, and I hope you don’t just blow this message off without reading it.
I’d just re-acquainted myself with Martin - an old UNR ski team buddy. He and I ran in to each other at the Beer Barrel and compared our mutual admiration for Mosaic. We both loved Mosaic just like Jim Clark.
Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.
By the time I finished reading Hack the Spew by Neal Stephenson, my thoughts of what it would mean to be a database or direct marketer in the future (2004? 20014?) were fundamentally shaken to the core. I was excited. I knew that I working in the casinos would only leave my lungs hacking for oxygen. So right then I made up my mind to quit and join the Internet.
I went to Sundance Bookstore on Keystone and bought Snow Crash and stayed up the next two nights and finished the book. And then I emailed Martin from my fresh PPP Connectus account on a rebuilt ZEOS to talk about his idea for this company he and Jay were calling Aztech Cyberspace…
Congratulations on a well deserved award!
I’d say things are clicking right along. Glad you had that epiphany!