Shop in Berkeley

I meet with Lee Trampleasure, who has been running ShopinBerkeley.com. I am surprised to find that Lee is not using a database-driven site. He is tired of updating all of his links. He also believes it is foolish to try to compete with Yelp! and Google is now jumping onto the local bandwagon, so as far as he's concerned, the game is over. Like me, he has a day job, and this is a part-time gig. Unlike me, he was actually making money at it for awhile, but now his income on the site comes from google ad links? What's wrong with that picture?

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.