PC Pioneers

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While all of this was going on I had another project that had been developing from way back when. The thought was to run around all the early innovators in the PC and Net market and get them to discuss their lives and developments to camera. There had been a spate of old-timers pontificating about their part in Hollywood, perhaps there was space for one on Silicon Valley? I had returned to the idea fairly regularly found no in to the video business.

I decided that now I had the time I would at least get down the facts and quotes into a file so that I could give some depth to the notion. As this evolvedI decided to link a self-published book with a website. I found a web hosting/designing individual in Varanasi India to do the technicals, and I laboriously produced material, pix and pages. Without meaning to, it soon ended up as four websites.

The book was The PC Pioneers, focussing on the individuals that brought us PCs and the Net rather more than on their technologies per se.

The four websites were – thePCstory.com, thePCpioneers.com, thePCtimeline.com, and wikiPCpedia.com. The four sites were interlinked rather than linear – with thePCstory running the text from the book, thePCpioneers providing a usable database of the pioneers with their dates and achievements, thePCtimeline was a database of events that also ran an OnThisDay service, cycling through them and providing the most interesting development from each day, wikiPCpedia was planned to be more free-form and to spin off into other issues. It proved to be a two-year monstrous task!

I sold books (still do) and got high levels of hits on the sites. But I found that keeping up with current developments was too heavy a task given I was no longer working from within the business. Then I signed up for an OU degree and let the sites sit there, but in 2016 took the sites down.