A Brief History On Computers and Internet

My first computer was a Goldstar MSX (later became Lucent Goldstar, LG). It ran Basic 1.0. It lacked the games of more famous Commodore 64 and I personally wrote a basic drawing software, mini games and stored them on a cassette. I started using it before I learned English. When I started American College (high school) my English was beyond Yes, No, One, Two, Three. I knew GOTO, PRINT, IF, RUN :) During high school I had an Amiga 500 upgraded to 1MB. I only played games with it, no programming. In high school I got computer class that thought Turbo Pascal on PC that ran MS-DOS. I would use 3.5 floppies at home for games, and 5 1/4 disks for programming at school.

My first contact with internet was in September 1996, when I started the university. The electronics engineering computer room was at the end of a narrow corridor. I sat on the first computer from the right when I entered the room. It was an old Macintosh. I clicked on the browser. I don't know why but I typed in nasa.gov. I also don't know why I used .gov extension instead of .com and it worked. After some time, the page started to form on the screen. Mainly characters and then the Nasa logo appeared. I was very impressed from what I saw on the screen. I was convinced that the information came from America not from the internal memory of the computer.

In 2001 when I was working in Frankfurt, I bought my first domain iboman.net. I created my second homepage with the images I shot with my first digital camera Finepix 4700 (I still have it and it still works). My first homepage dates back 1997 when I created one in Geocities on the Madison Avenue. I had no digital photos of myself. Therefore, it was mainly text based. While I was working in Frankfurt, there was no Facebook or Instagram to share my photos with my family and friends living in Turkey. That's why I created my homepage with lots of photo albums. I would create thumbnails of all the photos I uploaded. I would write the html pages manually including the alt-text for the images. In 2002 I had visited Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. I created the page for it on my homepage. It had quite some photos from the museum and each had the same alt-text "Porsche Museum". One day I saw my homepage was listed in top 10 on Altavista when searching Porsche Museum.

I still have the same Sweatshirt. Two photos taken 22 years apart.