Fifteen Years Behind the Wheel
Fifteen years ago, on the afternoon of February 14th, 1996, RoadTripAmerica.com sprang to life on the World Wide Web. We had registered the domain name a couple of months earlier, after which we immersed ourselves in the strange new language of HTML. We had also shelled out a thousand bucks for a Kodak DC 50 digital camera, a funny-looking black plastic box that could take pictures – wonder of wonders – without film. Set on “highest resolution,” the thing could store a whopping seven tiny images in its internal memory.
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The content on the original RoadTrip America site consisted of stories and photos from our two previous years “on the road.” To convert our library of slides to digital format in a world without slide scanners, we set up a movie screen, projected the images with a slide projector, and photographed the projected images with the primitive Kodak camera. The digital result wasn’t nearly as awful as you might think. Even that first-generation dinosaur had the ability to photograph projected images and television screens with surprising clarity. We don’t recommend it if you have a choice, but thanks to that odd old camera, RoadTrip America had quite a variety of photos on its pages from day one.
The Web site that “went live” fifteen years ago bears little resemblance to the RoadTrip America of today. Our original idea grew out of a print newsletter we began sending out once a month to friends and family in 1994. We had “hit the road” after our house burned down in a wildfire, and we wanted to keep in touch even though we’d adopted a nomadic lifestyle. Although we’d been using email to work and file the columns we wrote for newspapers and magazines, only a few of our friends knew what “e-mail” was. It was catching on fast, but it was still a format-free, text-only medium. The only sure-fire way to share a newsletter-type publication was by printing it on paper and sending it out by postal service.
When the mysterious but tantalizing concept of a “home page” on the “World Wide Web” began to seep into our awareness, a plan to replace our newsletter with a Web site began to take shape. Today, of course, we’d just fire up a blogging program, personalize it with some cute graphics, and start writing. Back then, though, the word “blog” hadn’t been invented, much less the software that makes it easy. To put things into perspective, Yahoo was less than two years old, and Google didn’t exist. The Web of early 1996 was a do-it-yourself Wild West. Anybody could homestead, but you had to be willing to build a site with primeval browsers and a limited palette of embryonic tools.
Armed with a laptop less powerful than a first-generation smart phone, that prototypical digital camera, and a dial-up account with America Online, we decided we were ready to hit the road to cyberspace while we were on the road in real life. We kept hearing that thousands of other people were hooking up to the Internet with cellular phones and satellite devices. Why not us? The fact that those other people were largely financed by the U.S. Army or Microsoft should have given us pause.
Fast forward fifteen years. While RoadTrip America is still on the road, we’ve made southern Nevada our home base. How we migrated from a wildfire in California to Las Vegas by way of 49 states and a dozen provinces is chronicled in Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier. Thanks to Jerry Garcia, there’s a short version: “Lately it occurs to me: what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Today, RoadTrip America offers advice, tips, and inspiration to roadtrippers around the globe. No longer “two dorks in an RV” (the phrase we once used to describe ourselves), we’re part of a vibrant community of road trip enthusiasts, writers, and advisors. You may have noticed the recent addition of mapping tools to the site. Automated road trip planning tools are something we’ve dreamed about for years. We’re still perfecting them, but as we celebrate our fifteenth year on the Web, we’re pleased that the Map Wizard and Map Center are up and running. With the Web still in a state of rapid evolution, we can’t help wondering what the next fifteen years will bring.
Thanks for joining us on the ride!
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