What is the internet?

As I go around to local small business owners in my neighborhood of Evergreen, I find that most of them don't know much about the internet, nor why they should be represented there. I talk to the publishers of a neighborhood business directory, telling them they should migrate their directory online. They seem angry, and say they have no interest in going online, nor of collaborating.

Undaunted, I launch my site, viewable here through the Internet Archive.

The original logo

In the beginning, I didn't have a graphics program, so the logo had to be simple. This is the first logo.

The name think-local

The name think-local came in consultation with a former employer, Judy Tretheway. She owned a local neighborhood newspaper. Originally I was going to collaborate with her. By the time I was up to speed with HTML, she had sold the newspaper and people were heavily into JAVA for writing pages. Since at that time, not all browsers supported JAVA, I decided to stick with HTML.

Think Local is started

Think local was started in 1997. I was "between jobs," and my old Kaypro computer was reaching the end of its usefulness. My brother, taking pity on me, sent me one of his old Windows computers. I can't remember if I paid him for this, but for some reason, $300 pops into my head.

I was never a programmer, but just for fun I played around with BASIC, and later took a FORTRAN class in school. Once I found out HTML was the language used for web pages, I bought books and started studying it. Back then, there were no graphic designers on the internet, so just a simple HTML page would not be laughed at.