With all the talk about the deaths of various industries -- from the car companies to newspapers to mortgage brokers -- I'm reminded of the time that my industry abruptly died on me.
It's been more than a decade, so it's easy to forget just how exciting the early days of the Web were. I first caught the bug in the mid-1990s, when I came across a programmer named Philip Greenspun -- a man who was truly ahead of his time. Along with five of his friends, Greenspun had started a Web development company, ArsDigita, at the beginning of the dot-com boom.
And long before blogs, Facebook, and oversharing online became endemic, Greenspun maintained a personal website on which he did something astonishing: Greenspun shared the whole story of the company he was building, live, as it happened. Everything from the big vision to the technical details.
Eventually, these essays formed the basis of a book, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. (The "Alex" in the title was Greenspun's dog, a huge white Samoyed.) The final chapter of the book was titled "A Future So Bright You'll Need to Wear Sunglasses." (You can read it, for free, at philip.greenspun.com.) It couldn't help leaving its readers excited about the fantastic new opportunities available on the Internet. Every single industry was going to be turned upside down! New industries would be created! Start-ups would make people rich! Which is really nice, because it's awesome to be rich! And, bonus: It'll never be winter again!
For programmers like me, this was extremely heady stuff, because it meant that, for the first time, we might not be relegated to tasks such as fixing the code on mainframe accounting software. We would have a new job -- designing and building the future itself!