@hedders Back in the early to mid 90’s, I used to hang out on IRC — and those folks truly ran the Internet.

Programmers who worked on things like DNS server daemons, authors of RFCs, multiple members of the IETF, people from Cisco Systems, telco managers, ISP support folks, management at some of the largest (public) data centres in the world…

Many of them were affected by MCI Worldcom, Global Crossing, and other dot-bomb implosions years later.

I remember hanging out for Y2K, talking to people in Europe to find out if everything was still working…. Sharing our panic when planes hit the world trade centre — we knew multiple people who worked there.

Many ended up at big-name Internet companies, and either ended up as much smaller parts of huge organizations, or moved into business as CIOs or CISOs.

It’s crazy how a bunch of kids helped shape the world.

@hedders At the time, it didn't seem like much. I'm talking about the days pre-world-wide-web... FTP, Gopher, eMail, IRC, Usenet... Hell, just getting connected was a huge ordeal. My first access to the internet was over dial-up to one of Canada's first public ISPs, which simply connected me to a shell server with a few menu options -- no PPP, no SLIP, no TCP/IP stacks on my computer.

It was truly a weird scene...