I still remember the day I was driving and heard on the radio that RadioShack was going to start carry "home computers". My enlightened response? Home computer? what the heck would anybody do with a computer at home?

Yeah...remind me -- what did we do with all that free time? ;-)

The lovely Mrs. Smith says we talked more. Funny, I seemed to remember we watched a lot of mindless TV.

In my opinion, the PC is the most efficient way to waste an evening yet invented by man.

The exception being, of course, the extremely important business of keeping a comment thread alive on a Content Free™ blog.

Good grief Eric. I can remember going to the research center in Plano, Texas in 1993ish and Gary White showing me a copy of NCSA Mosiac. I came back to Midland, Texas and remember (?) asking you and Lawless to develop our internal website using Mosaic as the browser. Maybe my memory is a bit selective but I also remember the first site developed for the O&G Company we worked for being around policies and procedures. Funny thing is that I still work with the policy and procedures guy (Larry) as well as Bill in my current job. I could make a comment or two about how it would be good to work with you again but I know how selective you are these days. Nonetheless, I appreciate you posting the “25 most influential…” Somehow I missed that eWeek posting and actually felt a bit of pain recalling the memory of ‘Sniffers’, ‘Dbase II’, and ‘Phoenix BIOS’. Influential products…maybe? Headache generators unquestionably.

John, your memory is pretty good, as always. I still remember writing a white paper, recommending that www access be granted generally throughout the office, arguing that the potential for improving productivity would offset the potential for abuse.

Boy, was I stupid. ;-)

As I recall, we didn't really use Mosaic all that much, as Netscape's first browser came out shortly thereafter and quickly took over the market.

I only vaguely recall that first internal website you mention. What I do remember is developing a "website on a disk" for HR to use in its college recruiting efforts. We were going to show how cool our company was by handing out floppy disks containing a propaganda website describing how great it was to work for us. Unfortunately, I think we then encountered a bust and stopped all college recruiting. But, man, we were cutting edge!

Since you young guys have taken me down memory lane, I recall making the first request for a PC at Arco in Dallas to do latest estimates. In order to get one, I first had to borrow one and successfully produce the estimates using Simplan spreadsheets. One limitation was that decimal places had to be two digits.

Larry, the TI Silent 700 terminal just was never good enough for you, was it? ;-)

You've got me thinking, now...what was that big honkin' calculator called that they were using in accounting up until the mid-70s? You remember -- it was about as wide as a desk, with more than 100 keys, and you punched a button to initiate the calculation and the thing would just clatter along by itself for a while until it finished its mechanical computations. I can still see some of those revenue clerks using 'em, but I can't remember what they were called.

After catching a head cold and/or allergies due to all the recent rain, I've decided that Puffs Plus with Aloe is one of the most important product developments of the past 25 years.

Amen to that.