Oh, back in the day...

I had the pleasure of attending a local university throughout the middle nineties. For our business class presentations we were all required to have our PPT presentations saved out in version 4.0, as Windows95 was yet to be universal around campus. So if your group had four members with a 40-slide presentation, figure out the logistics of assembling said presentation on a PC and then chunking it out onto 1.44 hd diskettes, ferrying them from the computer lab to the classroom and uploading the entire presentation to the available PC for projection onto the state-of-the-art screen. Networked file systems? Between schools? Feh.

Skip to 2000. I had a client who was an engineering firm whose website I coded and then updated on a monthly basis. Today we'd call that a blog with multiple contributors and an editor/administrator. back then it was me receiving a Zip disk in the MAIL with Word documents that needed to be converted to HTML and uploaded to different sections of the site. I would then fire-up my locally saved version of the site in Dreamweaver, copy and paste the new text to their corresponding pages and then save the entire website to the Zip disk and send it back to the client so that they could ftp it to their website. On a monthly basis, this took me a total of ten minutes and I was paid $50. Plus postage. This went on for a year.

The best part was building their website. I made an initial design that a five-year old would be embarrassed about and charged them $50 per page to implement the site. We're talking about one template fits all here. After getting the go-ahead for the site, I copied and pasted all of the content into the templates, sitting in my mother's basement dressed in my underwear while watching a Red Sox game. $1700 in under three hours.

I've been a web developer ever since, but I've never had it so good.