Back in early April of 1998, I was doing data entry for my mom at her accounting office, taking some classes at the SRJC, and doing sign work for my roommate and his dad. After tax season I needed another reasonably-stable stream of income aside from the sign work, so I submitted my resume to a place my friend Mori was working at at the time, Sonoma Interconnect.

According to my pay stub, May 6, 1998 was my official hire date. Ten years ago. There have been a lot of changes in the Internet Service Provider game since then; 56k dial-up has gone from a novelty to archaic, disk quotas have shot up from around 3 megabytes for most providers to practically all-you-can-eat at some places, Netscape and Eudora have been unseated by Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, titans AOL and Earthlink have been nibbled down by competition from incumbent telcos and cable companies that formed a residential broadband market. Three market bubbles have hit (two of which have since busted), the United States has seen a federal election stolen and two wars started. I’ve gotten married, had a child, buried a grandfather, and bought a home all in this time.