Paranormal Vaporware & the Birth of the Internet

Years ago at the boathouse, I was asked to contribute to a CD-ROM about the paranormal.

Some background on the boathouse. This was a large warehouse near Dupont Circle in Washington DC where a friend had decided to manufacture canoes. This friend had disappeared for a number of years, to resurface selling pot out of a brick garage in an alley. When asked why he had disappeared, he said that he was busted for selling LSD and wound up in jail.

Selling pot was safer and more lucrative. Before long it seemed as if he was selling pot to everyone in Northwest DC. So he now has enough money to rent this warehouse where he is going to make handmade canoes.

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Pretty soon the warehouse is full of handmade canoes. The handmade wooden canoes are expensive, and people just want cheap aluminum or plastic canoes. No one cares that these are handmade wooden ones. So my friend is casting around for some new business opportunity, and hears about this up and coming thing called The Internet.

That's where I come in. My friend invites me to a monthly round-table where we discuss this new thing, The Internet. As part of the deal, I got my first email account. For the average person, the internet didn't exist at that time. There were BBSes. Does anyone remember Bulletin Board Systems? An email account in those days was just a BBS where you could get email from someone beyond a local dial-up BBS. The internet was just some BBSes linked together.

To the extent that there was an Internet, it was strictly for geeks, because you had to know UNIX commands. It was too hard to use for the average user to bother with. As part of my job as a journalist for the round-table I went to the first internet trade show in DC and picked up a floppy from a booth. The floppy had Netscape Navigator on it, a supposed "killer app" that would make the internet easier to use. It was the first web browser that had wide use. The logo for Netscape was a Tyrannosaurus, because it was a "Killer app".

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I brought the diskette to the round table and the computer art guy snatched it from me, even though it was Windows and he used Macs.

Eventually the round-table turned into a large website design company that still exists, but I got involved in a side project of making a CD-ROM on the paranormal. The guy designing the CD-ROM planned to have both "pro" and "con" views on it. He lent me Jung's book on UFOs. I quickly realized that it would be a large a task to write a piece summarizing Jung's views of UFOs. More importantly, I became skeptical that the paranormal CD-ROM would ever see the light of day, or if it did, that the project would make money and that the people who worked on it would get paid. There was talk of a mysterious financier who was going to back the project, but it all turned into vaporware.