My
Yahoo email address is a constant reminder of Mark. It is the “.geo” at the end of my name that
is the link to the past. It refers back
to GeoCities, an early free website.[i] Websites, “surfing the net”, and staring at a
computer screen for hours were all relatively new experiences in 1995.
It
had been a cold winter, and Mark sat in my office at the little color Mac for
hours. Browsers were a relatively new
thing. Internet Explorer made much more
sense to the average person than had Gophers[ii]
or even Mosaic[iii]. Mark would sit and click looking for law
databases and coming across many other new and unique things such as
GeoCities.
We
both built websites. Mine was a long rambling
text proving the word “Woodstock” had taken on a specific meaning in the
English language. It was replete with
citations from newspapers and magazines illustrating my point. Mark’s was an exercise in HTML (hypertext
markup language). He enjoyed turning his
letters into blinking colors, and adding clouds and other features such as
links to the Supreme Court. The actual
message on his website was a warning that the site was protected under
copyright law. There was really no other
content, but Mark was giving it some thought.
He
was not neurotypical and could turn his laser mind to one idea. For a while, it was his quest to discover
what one sound when added to a website would gain worldwide attention. Mp3 files were not common in 1995, but the
little Mac was capable of recording and placing sound on the web. Mark concentrated on this idea for days,
asking my opinion over and over while waving his index finger in a circular
motion towards the ceiling.
He
first spoke of Schma. [iv]
Was I, he wondered, aware of Schma? I
admitted my awareness was sort of limited to the Michener novel The Source[v],
and vague references to Hebrew School made by my Jewish ex-husband. It could be chantable, but Mark thought that
idea totally beside the point. He was
searching for the one important sound. Suggesting his favorite mantra[vi]
was also not relevant as the implication was obvious. “Om” was not the sound for which he
searched.
Finally,
as my patience started to fade, I said overall it was my opinion vowels had it
above consonants as pure sound. “Ahhh”
was better than “llll”. “Lah” was
nice. Mark burst into gales of laughter
as though I had told him the best joke in the universe. His laughter was contagious, and I joined in
although the exact humor involved escaped me.
In retrospect, it was hearing his laughter that was good. This jovial episode was the end of our
conversation on sound, and we did not speak of it again.
My
endnotes come from Wikipedia, for the most part. They are there to provide some context in
time.
[i] David
Bohnett and John Rezner originally founded GeoCities in late 1994 as Beverly
Hills Internet (BHI). In its original form, site users selected a
"city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were
named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example,
computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those
dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the
name of the site.
Ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company
announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on
October 26, 2009, and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable the next
day. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was
shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
[ii] A
system that pre-dates the World Wide Web for organizing and displaying files on
Internet servers. A Gopher server presents its contents as a hierarchically structured
list of files. With the ascendance of the Web, many gopher databases were
converted to Web sites which can be more easily accessed via Web search
engines.
Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota and
named after the school's mascot. Two systems, Veronica and Jughead, let you
search global indices of resources stored in Gopher systems.
[iii] Mosaic
was the first widely distributed graphical browser or viewer for the World Wide
Web. It is usually considered to have been the software that introduced the
World Wide Web and the Internet to a wide general audience. Once Mosaic was
available, the Web virtually exploded in numbers of users and content sites.
The success of Mosaic depended on the recent invention and adoption of
Hypertext Transfer Protocol by Tim Berners-Lee.
Mosaic arrived in 1993. Marc Andreessen, then in his
early 20s, is credited with inventing or leading the development of Mosaic. He
developed it at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at
the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois. Andreessen and others went on
to become part of Netscape Communications, originally called Mosaic
Communications. Netscape then produced what was, for a while, the world's most
popular browser, Netscape Navigator.
[iv]
Transliteration: Sh’ma yis-ra-eil,
A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu, A-do-nai E-chad
[v] The
Source is a historical novel by James A. Michener, first published in 1965. It
is a survey of the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from
pre-monotheistic days to the birth of the modern State of Israel. The Source
uses for its central device a fictional tell in northern Israel called
"Makor" (Hebrew: "source"?).
