My first paid writing job, Part 1 - Oh, how things have changed

While doing some admin on my many external hard drives the other day I stumbled on some pieces I wrote around the turn of the Millennium which brought back a lot of memories of my first real paid work as a writer. For a few years around 2000 - 2002 I was a "Diarist" for the official Middlesbrough FC Website. 

Blogger would be a more apt title now, but this was when the internet as we know it was still very young and although interest in blogging was starting to pick up, the word wasn't in common usage and online content still used print media terms often as not.

I'll talk more about the blog itself in Part 2, and explain why I was hiding under the pseudonym DJ Stanley at the time, but re-reading the old posts for the first time in 14 years or so made me think about how much the internet has changed.

The IT landscape was certainly different back then. The onrushing Millennium had everyone panicking that all electronics would immediately die or take over the world at midnight on New Years Day 2000, neither happened... you would have read about it. 

There was a DotCom Boom in 1999, when IT stocks increased in value by so much it prompted otherwise respectable organisations to change their names to things like FredSmith.Com in order to keep up with the cool kids. 

This was quickly followed by the DotCom bust, which prompted the same companies to regret calling themselves anything other than boring old Fred Smith.

Windows 95. Still better than Windows 8

Windows 95 was still the pre-eminent operating system at the time. Don't remember that? Imagine Windows XP, but much blockier. (What do you mean you can't remember Windows XP either?)

In fact there were still many DOS programs in use in offices up and down the UK. I know, I managed a few of them for a certain High Street Bank.

There was no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube because Myspace had yet to jump start the social media revolution and the most social any of us got was MSN Messenger, which seemed extremely futuristic at the time but was basically Whatsapp for your PC.

The Laptops of the day required both an exceedingly large lap and particularly good eyesight if they were to be used, along with a willingness to accept that the term "Portable" was comparative and one should under no circumstances try to lift a laptop without supervision.

Remember this fella? No? Google him... (Oh, the irony)

Back then Google was just an interesting academic exercise causing a small stir behind the two big search engines Yahoo and AskJeeves (Remember him? As soon as they dropped Jeeves it was going to end in failure, lets be honest, he was the brains AND the looks of the outfit.) 

MSN and AOL were the two giants of the time, expected to rule the virtual seas for years to come. Whilst an upstart called Napster had the music industry so worried that they had to ask Metallica to be scary on their behalf. 

Amazon was around, but struggling to make a profit as people, still distrustful of internet shopping, merely used it as an online catalogue before walking to Argos to make their purchases.

ARGH! What the hell is that?

Even Apple, the most pre-eminent IT company of our time, was just a manufacturer of brightly coloured, vaguely interesting, niche computers used by graphic designers. 

Samsung made fairly standard televisions and fax machines.

An Xbox was something that contained breakfast.

It was a very very different place.

In Part 2 I'll take a look at the pieces that prompted this little wander down memory lane, once I get them off the floppy disk. 

What do you mean you don't know what a floppy disk is?