Designed my first website for a friend in MS Paint and notepad. Can you believe it????, then i came accross netscape composer, frontpage and later dreamweaver. I remember programming my first website in ASP for my community and i did it in 3 days with only 2 -3 hours of sleep each day. I had no idea there was a WHERE clause in SQL, i would just loop through the entire recordsets to match the right record. So the website with Articles, News, Forum, Poll was programmed completely from scratch with such stupid code.

IRC was hot and so was ICQ (at least in India). I can still remember my ICQ number even though i have not used it for past 7 years.

And those pages with black background on tripod and geocities (hot free hosting sites) with animated gifs of fire and cartoons were all over the place and seemed like a standard for personal pages.

*sigh* how far we’ve come….

I remember I did my first website when I was 17 years old. It was an armature website about the \\\”Dodge Viper\\\” using FrontPage! And it got featured in some famous Arab internet magazine that I used to read by then. I can\\\’t remember the magazine\\\’s name but it was doing a pretty good job in tracking online related activities and business in the Arab world.

In 1999, I was around 18 and I got involved in some actual work with my father’s company. Projects were for clients like Dubai’s Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Tourism and some other Big Hotels like JB in late 2001, I got exposed to lots of interesting ideas not only in Online but in Digital Media as well, I can tell you that the acceptance for such ideas and new media were not that interesting. I guess you can turn that to the lack of online knowledge and internet reach at that time

1. I didnt know what were search engines. (Popular was Yahoo)

The interviewer told me to understand what is Yahoo Search Engine and get back to him in a week time. I got the offer and got the designation of Internet Customer Support Executive. And they put me on Hotmail project. Hotmail was damn popular and any individual\’s 1st email account used to be on Hotmail as compared to Yahoo or Excite or USA.net. I still have the same email account which I had registered in the year 2000. And as Martin said, SME\’s used to have their email accounts on Hotmail, we use to close such accounts because you cannot use Hotmail account as a business account. We used to send one warning mail, and then close the accounts. I used to love that. Later, after one month\’s time, I was moved to another project, Webhelp. They had a beautiful concept. They had developed a chat aplication which we used to use to chat with the customers. The idea was, respond to the customers\’ queries and SEARCH relevant information for them. People used to subscribe for the service. We used to use the free version of Copernic and Kateisoft as the tools. Copernic is a search tool which pulls information from various search engines and directories and kateisoft was a multi-frame web browser. We used to put the keywords in Copernic and drag those links in katiesoft and send the relevant link to the customers.

People are still not aware how that thing used to work, but they used to say, Webhelp is SMART. And today, we all know Google and web and www. Even a 5 year old kid goes to Google and types the keyword and get what he/she wants.

And pretty much all portals used to cheat on their impression delivery hiding 20 banner codes in tags or in chat applications.

And most importantly, my ex-boss at a well known Dubai agency was trying hard to convince people like me, Dee & Ash to become a THROUGH THE LINE agency. We thought different, and became truly digital boys and girls

Great stuff!

This is the real thing indeed.

Were you cleaning your room or your time machine?

Cheers.