Fall 2001, huh? That time feels like a different planet now. I remember I was trying to get something off the ground, something digital. Everyone was still reeling from the dot-com crash, and then, well, September happened. It cast a long shadow over everything, including the little projects we tinkered with.
My Grand Plan: The Digital Scrapbook
So, I had this idea. Digital cameras were just starting to not suck completely, you know? People were taking pictures, but sharing them was a pain. Emailing them was clunky, files were big for dial-up. I thought, “I’ll build a simple site where folks can upload their snaps and make little online albums.” Sounds basic now, like a dozen apps you have on your phone, but back then, it felt like an actual thing, a real venture.
I got started with the tools I had. Think old-school HTML, maybe a bit of JavaScript I barely understood. Server-side? Man, I was wrestling with some really janky Perl scripts at first. PHP was around, but finding good hosting that supported it without costing an arm and a leg was a whole other quest. It was a proper struggle. No fancy frameworks, no Stack Overflow to just copy-paste solutions from. You just banged your head against the wall until something clicked or you gave up for the day. I spent hours, days, just trying to get a simple upload script to work without crashing the whole thing.
My setup was a joke by today’s standards. A creaky old desktop, a monitor that probably weighed more than me, and a dial-up modem that sounded like a robot dying every time it connected. Uploading a single photo, even a small one, could take ages. And I was trying to build a photo sharing site. The irony, right? The sheer patience required was something else.
The World Had Other Plans
I spent weeks, maybe a couple of months, tinkering away in my spare time. Got a basic upload feature working. Could display a few low-res images in a very crude gallery. Felt like I was actually building something tangible, something that might even be useful. But the whole atmosphere, especially after September, was just… heavy. The economy was already shaky from the dot-com bust, and then it just nosedived further. Nobody was really in the mood for new online toys, especially from some unknown guy working out of his bedroom.
I remember trying to show it to a few friends. They’d nod politely, say “cool,” but you could see their minds were elsewhere, preoccupied with the news, with job security, with bigger things. Funding? Forget about it. That well had run dry long before and was now just a dusty hole in the ground. Every door felt shut, or like people were too distracted to even notice you knocking.
It wasn’t like one big moment of failure where I threw my hands up. More like a slow fade, a project that ran out of steam.
- The initial excitement and energy wore off.
- The technical hurdles seemed bigger and more frustrating when the motivation dipped.
- The world outside just felt too uncertain and grim for these kinds of passion projects.
So, that “digital scrapbook” thing? It just kind of withered on the vine. I never officially “quit” or deleted the files with any ceremony. It just got less and less of my time, overshadowed by more pressing concerns, until one day I realized I hadn’t touched the code in weeks, then months. It ended up being one of those folders you find years later on an old hard drive, full of half-finished dreams and commented-out code.
Looking back, Fall 2001 was a tough time to be ambitious with anything new, especially online. It taught me a lot, though, in its own way. Mostly about how much external stuff, stuff completely out of your control, can just sideswipe your best-laid plans and neat ideas. You can have a decent idea, you can put in the hours, you can wrestle with the tech, but sometimes the world just says “nope, not now.” And you just gotta deal with that, learn from it, and move on. Or, like me with that project, you just let it gather digital dust until you almost forget about it, only for the memory to pop up when you think about that specific autumn.
