Twelve Years of Internet Access

I first got internet access at the EEE Department at UP Diliman in late 1995. Back then, AltaVista was the rage, Google was unknown, Internet Explorer was a laughable piece of crap, Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold was king, Linux kernels were at 1.2.13, and state-of-the-art consisted of a 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM.

Check out my web site from mid 1996. Replete with '90s-isms like tiled background, gratuitous use of tables to separate stuff, little image icons in the left side, and Linux zealot-ism galore.

Mystical lyricist of my dreams?!! egads! Well, at that time, I had never had a girlfriend. It explains everything.

This page was supposed to be part of our official laboratory home page.



Another list of those people:


And here's a recent (couple weeks ago) picture of (some) of those same people:



Yet, some things haven't changed. I still use Linux more naturally than Windows; just re-discovered how much I miss the command line when I rebooted to Linux a while ago and found myself using

sleep 5; xwd -root > dump; convert -geometry 25% dump dump.png

to take screenshots. In some ways I was smarter, faster, better twelve years ago. I thought nothing of writing Fast Fourier Transforms in C. One-dimensional, then repeat to get a 2D FFT for image filtering. I knew about things like the Hough and Homomorphic Transforms. I was a mad C coder.

Now, I am lazy. Google has made it almost completely unnecessary to write code for well-known problems. Eclipse has made programming much easier (I used PICO, JOE, and Emacs in those days). I know more, but I don't think as fast as I used to. I get tired a lot faster, no more three nights without sleep. I'm much more portly. Older. Hopefully wiser.

I keep telling one of my friends in the picture that, although we look back on college as a fine, nostalgic time, we keep forgetting that we didn't have any money back then. But I was using

sleep 5; xwd -root > dump; convert -geometry 25% dump dump.png

back then. And I thought I'd be a teacher. I never imagined that twelve years later, I would be very happily married, live in our own home, have a relatively comfy existence, and work for the biggest database vendor in the world.

Not too bad, really.