outskirts: life and times in charlottesville

One decade ago I was a graduate student studying radioactive nuclear beams. These were the early days of the web. Netscape 2 was in beta form and was loose on the web. It was the first browser to support the new technology called plug-ins. Plug-ins allowed content other than text and images to be put on the web and viewed within the browser window. Netscape was waking up the web.

Startup screen of Netscape 2.

In December 1995 I heard about the Shockwave plug-in that was getting ready to be released. I got rather excited, since I’d played with the multimedia program called Macromedia Director 4 a year earlier when working on a “future of the education and the web” project for an education course I was taking (unbeknownst to my advisor). The web had started to bore me by 1995 with the text/image limitations. Being able to bring full multimedia to it sounded sweet.

Logo associated with Macromedia Shockwave content.

During the holiday break I wanted to re-learn Director, and the programming language associated with it. I sat down and tried to create something that would help in a physics class I was teaching that semester.

On December 28, 1995 I walked in to work and showed my first “Gizmo” to a few people that were there that day (things were pretty slow during the holiday break - but physicists always seem to be at work). No one seemed really excited by it, but I thought it was cool. In between experiments at the Cyclotron I started putting together a few more of these web-based simulations, and putting them up on a website.

Image of my first Shockwave creation, December 28, 1995.

The original URL of the site was http://www.nscl.msu.edu/cycrip/science/ and it sat on a cute little Mac IIsi on the desk in my office running MacHTTP to serve the content to the world. Two weeks later I had three Gizmos up on my site.

Site on Feb 10, 1995.

An inclined plane, a reflex tester, and an air track. The oldest version of the site I still have on an old CD is from February 18, 1996. A week later a fourth Gizmo was added - a density lab. Three of the four Gizmos still work despite the changes in technology since then (what did you have on your desk in 1995?). They run rather quickly, since I never worried about gigahertz computers back then.

View of the site on Feb 18, 1996.

In mid-January (just three weeks after putting the site up) I got an email where someone was interested in paying me to develop more educational multimedia using Shockwave. They had never seen anything like it before on the web. As a poor graduate student I jumped at the chance to earn some spare cash.

My career was taking a turn, but it wasn’t easy to see at the time.

My research continued and eventually became a thesis (1.3 meg). That thesis led to a post-doc position and eventually to a faculty position. During this time I continued to play with my site in my spare time. When first hosting the site on the Mac IIsi the stats files started filling up the hard drive every night (I think it had a 10 meg hard drive…don’t remember for sure). If I didn’t remove the stats file every day the computer hard drive would fill up and a bad crash was the result. The site was moved to http://www.ppsa.com/science/ during 1996. In 1997 the site got its own URL of http://www.ExploreScience.com.

Logos from the site in 1996-1997.

The number of visitors continued to increase. In 1997 the web was really starting to explode and the site continued to receive awards. My fifteen minutes of fame had begun. My favorite of all time was the review by Yahoo when I was one of the picks of the week (March 9, 1998).

You cross the line and tumble into a shocking world of science gone mad. [DocMultimedia], mild-mannered scientist, has trapped, untangled, and illustrated the laws of physics. His creation: Explore Science — a shockwave-laden experience of sights, sounds, and interaction with scientific theory. Observe harmonic motion, mouse genetics, and the physics of golf. Abandon, if you dare, the world of two-dimensional textbook illustrations, and enter DocMultimedia’s interactive world. Reality begins to swirl, dance, and coalesce…

The site was included in numerous magazines and newspapers including USA Today and Popular Science, and recognized on many sites such as Exploratorium, Yahoo, and ENC. It even made it into the Sunday Comics section of many national newspapers one weekend in 1998.

An award from Exploratorium.

Time continued to roll along. I was a professor with a joint appointment in the physics and education departments of a small university. The two person physics department suffered a great loss when the chair passed away in the middle of the year. Suddenly I was running the physics department. In the education department the state was reviewing the department for academic issues and accreditation. Between teaching a double course load and going through thousands of documents related to accreditation I was rather busy to say the least.

In the middle of that year I heard from someone that was trying to get a startup company going. The web was still in startup mode and people were getting rich. The company would create math and science content for the web. Right up my alley. At this same time came another potential academic job at a school I really liked (a place that gets snow!).

The wheel of life was turning a bit more quickly.

Decision time came and the startup company was the choice. That was in 1999. Right about then the web began to run out of easy cash. For six years we continued to be the “roaches of the internet.” No one could get rid of us no matter how hard they tried. My multimedia skills continued to improve and hundreds of Gizmos have made it on to the company site.

In March 2005 a really large company bought our tiny little company. I’m now just one of many employees in a more Dilbert-like world. I think I’m number 24601 (just call me Jean). My fifteen minutes of fame has ended (or is almost over). The big web bucks never arrived, but I’m not starving. The academic world is far away, as are the days of being a graduate student.

Image from Daily Progress article.

It is amazing what one little plug-in can do to your life. The day of December 28, 1995 has shaped my life for the past decade. Has it been a good move or not (or should I ask if that was a “good” day)? I guess I won’t know for at least another ten years. Is some small thing I’m working on today going to change the next decade of my life? I’m sitting here in a big house all alone typing on a gorgeous iBook with my gigantic HDTV on in the background. Is that all there is? I don’t really know what tomorrow will bring. Or the next decade.

Is today a good day?

I’ve always been a “go with the flow” sort of guy, so I guess I’ll just wait to see where the eddies carry me.

eddy (n): A drift or tendency that is counter to or separate from a main current, as of opinion, tradition, or history.

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is.