Pam's Home Page

I remember quite a long time ago things were different. A man could, with a little hard work and a great idea, make something of himself. And with this I would like to tell you about my friend Andy. Sure Andy received his higher degrees at Stanford and now works for a major consultancy in NYC, but Andy's most memorable contribution to the human race started back in the summer of '95. Oh what a time to remember.

You see, back in the olden days of the web there was no Google or MSN. This was a time when the Web was free. Before the web was polluted with advertisers and adwords, people actually had to type in urls manually. There was Lycos and Gopher and a few other search engines trying to help the 15 users (mostly teenagers without dates) of the world wide web find earth shattering and life changing information (porn). Oh to stumble upon such a nugget of knowledge (nude photo) was truly a blessing. It was no where near as easy as it was today. No pop-ups, no animated gifs, no videos. Just imagine a world without Utube. As web crawlers and search engines began to become more wide spread, the search for "knowledge" became a lot easier for the users of this world wide web. At about the same time in history another phenomenon was sweeping civilization, Baywatch. The popularity of former KnightRider star, David Hasselhoff was soon surpassed by a new star--Pamela Anderson (CJ). The two words , Pamela Anderson, were the most prolifically typed words into web crawlers of the day. This was solely for the sake of "knowledge".

Searching for the nuggets of knowledge was not all the 15 or so users of the web did, they also created these things called "home pages". Home pages were places where one could place pictures of oneself and pictures of one's cat. One could also place textual information about oneself and one's friends. My friend Andy had one home page. (I just realized how stupid one sounds when one overuses "one".) He showed it to me. The early adopters of the WWW were quite competitive. The way to know that you were the king of the Web was to have the most visits to your web site. This, of course, is still the object of Web page writers today however it is mostly to generate advertising revenue. Back then, it was only for bragging rights.

Andy was the king. He had the bragging rights and then some. He kicked everyone's butt. By the summer of '95, there was a heck of a lot more people on the web than the founding 15. Andy's home page surpassed all of his competitors with 1000's of hits daily. How did he do it?
Andy revealed his secret. He showed me that his web page was quite long. It had a colored banner at the bottom that when the color was changed in the editor, the magic was revealed. There, I made out, in the smallest font possible, the words "Pamela Anderson" back to back millions of times. I told him I didn't understand. He opened up Lycos and typed in those same magic words. When he hit "Go get it" the top return was Andy's Home Page. All work and No play didn't make Andy a dull boy at all. It made him King, at least for a while.

However, in a few weeks Andy's reign was over. The world had moved on to become much more sophisticated. The search engines got better. Would-be porn surfers got what they were looking for and it wasn't a picture of Andy's family on a rock in their Sunday best. Innocence lost. But for a few weeks that summer a man, his hard work and his dream were combined to create the American Dream.