What were you doing in 1993?
I'll go first: I was quitting college in New Hampshire and moving to Miami to get the hell away from the snow and winter. (Seasonal Affect Disorder. I normally do nutty things around this time every year). While there I got my first real job out of school at IBM's Boca Raton campus where the IBM PC was born. I was helping write OS/2 Success Stories for the Media Relations department. It was very interesting, actually. We were using Lotus Notes to enter the stories and that's how I later became a Notes consultant, etc. etc.
However, this isn't nearly as cool as what Joi Ito was doing:
Back in 1993 IIKK, which was Japan's first commercial Internet connection, was looking for a place to put their POP. They were owned at the time by Intercon and they were unknown in Japan. No one would rent an office to them. I lent them my bathroom. A few months later PSINet bought IIKK. I was probably one of the first people in Tokyo to have a 128K leased line to their toilet.
... I also ran PSINet Japan for about a year until I got them out of my bathroom and into a real office. ;-)
Incredible... There's a picture on the site of his bathroom which is worth a gander. So while I was dicking around as temp-employee 360,001 at IBM, Joi was launching major portions of Japan's Internet infrastructure in his john... there's some perspective for you.
So. The real thought of this post is this. That was 10 years ago. The question is what am I going to be doing in 2003 that in 2013 I'll be able to look back and think, "Wow... it's amazing what you started in your bathroom."
-Russ