I was just thinking about how long I’ve been on the web. At least since 1993 when I first discovered America Online (no, it wasn’t officially called AOL back then).  I still remember signing into America Online with my dial-up modem on my Apple Macintosh SE/30 – if you don’t remember those, they were the tiny all-in-one computers with black-and-white screens.

When I was ready to “surf the web”, I downloaded a program offered by America Online called WebCrawler.  It took over EIGHT HOURS to download that.  I remember asking “how do I see the internet with the pictures on it?” I had heard you could see pictures on the internet, but I was using a text-based browser called Lynx, mostly for checking something called “email”. I dont even remember who was emailing me.  I would actually dial-in to the university, for free, to get my email. But I quickly learned that to see “pictures” on the internet, I needed an ISP – and I had to pay for that.

At that time, I’d use WebCrawler to access Yahoo. Yahoo was grey at the time and it only did one thing (provide links to sites) and it was free!  My favorite search engine was InfoSeek – there was no Google. And guess what, even in a Google-less world we were able to survive!

When I asked “what’s the web for?” Someone told me “To make web pages – you can say what you had for lunch on it” (I think that was his only example at the time).  But now we can talk about our lunch on our WordPress blogs…but even without WordPress, we did quite well.

Back to America Online. I spent hours and hours in the chat rooms! Now, I can just go to Facebook and basically accomplish the same thing. But even without Facebook – we were OK.

People were selling stuff online too.  I was moving to NYC and needed some information to find an apartment. That is no small task in NYC, trust me.  I “infoseeked” apartments in NYC. And guess what? Some guy in Brooklyn had created a product chock full of information and tips on finding an apartment in NYC.  I sent him a money order and he mailed it out to me very quickly.  There was no digital download, but I was very happy. I was thrilled.

Oh, and shopping was still available as well. I “infoseeked” some kind of electronic toy. I can’t remember, it had to do with music, maybe it was a drum machine.  But I found a guy who owned a store selling it. Guess what I had to do?  Call him and give him my credit card information (including the 800 number on the back and my zip code so he could verify that I indeed had the money to pay for it).   Very basic ecommerce, but it worked for us!

All this to say, none of the stuff you’re learning or experiencing online is really new.  It’s all been around in some form or another for many years. And in 10 years from now it’s going to be in some other form. Search engines, product creation, ecommerce, blogging.  Been there, done that – only the technologies that have changed – its made things easier, faster and given it a new shiny face.

Creating your own products is definitely the way to go if you are looking for a solid way to build a home or online business – it’s lasted 16 years so far and I can vouch for it (wow, I’ve been buying information products online for over 16 years!)