I never liked computers growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, not really anyway. I loved technology but I was mostly indifferent toward computers, regarding them as boring, constrained tools. Two of my neighbors had Windows 2.x machines, my interaction with them consisted mostly of gaming. At home we had an old commodore and some unusual other system (which had an awesome cartridge based rip-off clone of pac-man), both were about as interesting to me as a toaster. My father had purchased them at some point - in theory for business purposes - they didn't seem to get used much. I liked building things and I hated having other people tell me what to do with my time or brain. From an early age, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur of some sort and I thought I might want to go into the aerospace field. Then in late 1994 I was introduced to the World Wide Web. That changed everything about how I viewed the world, I couldn't get enough of it. I grew up in Appalachia, a world apart from the kind of intellectual stimulation I craved. The potential of the Web was immediately obvious, it was like being hit with a sledgehammer. Suddenly you go from feeling disconnected from the world, to chatting with thousands of people from all around the planet on the WebChat Broadcasting System. Ecommerce, primitive streaming, communities, message boards, personal home pages, search, internet time, online gaming, blinking text, spinning gifs, applets, instant messaging, frames, oh man. Working on a solitary PC always felt like I was a TV repairman. With the Internet, the Web, you could be Spielberg, it was a platform seemingly infinite in potential to build upon. You didn't need permission, you didn't have to jump through red tape, you could just dial-in and start doing. I was enthralled by the era in general, it was an epoch, the big bang. Since it was simultaneously my formative teen years, the memories from 1995-2000 or so, are extremely vivid. Everything about the Web seemed incredible, every new site & service, no matter how silly. The stories from that time are permanently imprinted into my brain because of that. I had a pretty good recollection of the specifics, I double checked the exact figures.