Sometimes it's nice to reflect how far we've come as a company since we started in October of 1997. Bruce Demske started the company as the internet was really taking off and we did web design, hosting, and programming, just like we do now, and networking, which we really don't do anymore. It's hard to remember but back in those days Novell was the predominant networking software, Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT 4 were still new to the scene, most computers shipped without NIC's, and sharing a printer was hard! You saw a lot of email addresses at aol.com and a lot of email addresses that looked like 12345.16789@compuserve.com. I used Mosaic but Netscape was taking over the browser market and for email it was Eudora. Good times!

We started out with a single server running Windows NT 4.0 with IIS 3 which was the first version to support host headers, which allowed multiple web sites to run on a single ip address. Which was good as we only had 15 ip addresses for the ISDN line we had running in my garage. We ran MacDNS on a Centris 610 which crashed randomly so we soon upgraded to a digital alpha Multia running BIND on Linux, which was super reliable. At the time we ran imail for our mail services. Our disk space was measured in megabytes back then and we designed to keep pages under 50k lest users leave before the page was loaded. We could assume a 640x480 screen resolution, and that's it, even though some computers, notably my PowerBook Duo 230 I used on the road, didn't even have that. Programming wise, we could assume 4mb Ram and extensions could only access 32k at any given time. Not quite punch cards but we are glad to leave most memory management tasks to the OS these days!

Our site back in those days was pretty simple and straightforward, which we still hope that it is today. While a lot of things have changed (ie there was no google, you had to manually submit your site for inclusion in search engines and 'web directories', and SEO was largely via metatags), a lot remains the same. Our web site remains a simple overview of what we do and a quick means of contacting us.

We do a lot of different things now, programming for devices like the iPhone and Android devices that didn't exist in 1997 in languages like Objective C and Java that were niche players in 1997, but our basic approach has remained the same, we work with our clients to craft solutions that help them accomplish their business goals. It's not easy to envision what things will be like in 2031 but although the technologies will undoubtedly be different, our approach will remain the same with our focus squarely on our customer needs!
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