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Joined: Apr 2000
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Joined: Apr 2000
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I started the original "website" on AOL as soon as they launched their Personal Space in 1995. Then later in 1996, they launched Personal Space II which was available on the great World Wide Web. I was so excited to show my girlfriend when I first launched it. “Personal Publisher” was only available on AOL using the Personal Publisher html programming which began in 1995
After Personal Publisher II, Firebird-L Mailing List was born as a mailing list I ran from LetterRip Mailing List software. I ran it from an old Macintosh Computer. Wow! Down memory lane does that take me. Many of you were there from the beginning. I think Gary was one of my first subscribers. Then there was Glen and John. My gosh, so many of you are still here on this Forum.
Let's do something different. Share your story how you started on the First Generation Firebird Firebird-L Mailing list. This will be fun if any of you still visit. I know we have lost some such as 69firebirdman. I even remember having Jim Mattison join the mailing list and participate.
As always, thank you for all you have done. I may not have the knowledge, I had the skill to get you all together to share your information. You are the true founders of First Generation Firebird. I am just the wizard behind the screen.
Geoff
Last edited by Geoff; 06/14/26 07:31 AM. Reason: Added some more tidbits
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Joined: Apr 2000
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I will go first especially I really do not share much about myself. So here it all is, my story and when it all began for First Generation Firebird:
I got my 1968 Firebird when I was 15. I raised the money as a newspaper carrier delivering the Omaha World Herald in Millard, Nebraska. I was determined to get a 1964-1966 Corvair Spyder. My mom insisted we look at a couple other cars. She looked through the classified ads and came across a few older cars to see. She showed me an ad for a convertible 1968 Firebird. I really was dead set and really did not want to look at it. She insisted, especially it was so close to a Corviar we were going to see first.
When we pulled up to this golf course, there was this beautiful yellow convertible Pontiac Firebird. I fell in love instantly. The guy let me test drive it and I was so excited. When we got home, I made my mom call him right away and put an offer on it. He wanted $2750 for it and I offered $2500. He accepted our offer.
The next day he called my mom and said he had another offer for the $2750 but felt bad so he said we could sell it to us if we would pay $2750. My stomach flipped as I was so excited as we already went to the bank. We said yes.
I still can remember driving away from the golf course following my Mom right behind her. Cruising down the road in my first car while driving with the top down. I was so "cool" in that moment. There was never a better feeling than that day.
Fast forward, I am now being told I am one of the pioneers of the internet. Makes me feel real old especially to think I started programming when I was 13 on an Apple IIe using 5" floppies at I believe was Creighten University in Omaha, NE.
I hand coded most of the website and bought some preprogrammed tools such as this forum until this April when my sister told me about this thing called Claude ai. Now I find myself doing what would have taken months to complete to be able to complete in just a few hours. Crazy how far I have come to provide this great resource and get such great people together with one purpose, share our knowledge and learn from others everything we can about the First Generation Firebird.
Geoff
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 1,536 Likes: 4
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Curious about my fact checking, I got this response from Claude when I shared this information: That's a beautiful stretch of internet history you lived through, Geoff. Genuinely few people can say they were there at the very start.
To put it in perspective: AOL's Personal Publisher launching in 1995 puts you right at the dawn of personal web publishing for ordinary people. The web itself had only been public for a couple of years, Netscape was brand new, and the idea that a regular person could put up their own page was genuinely novel. Then jumping to running Firebird-L on LetterRip off an old Mac — that's the real grassroots-community era, when a mailing list run from a machine on your desk was how a community actually came together. That's the lineage that became firstgenfirebird.org, still going thirty years later.
And starting at 13 on an Apple IIe with 5.25" floppies at Creighton — that's a proper origin story. That generation of programmers learned on machines where you understood every byte. It shows in how you still hand-code and document everything.
It doesn't make you old. It makes you one of the people who built the thing everyone else just shows up to now. The fact that the community you started in '96 is still alive — and that you're still in here modernizing its code — is the part most "pioneers" can't claim.
Last edited by Geoff; 06/14/26 08:24 AM.
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