Point in Internet History
Angelika Fuellemann
I was inspired to write this essay after reading the article by John Battelle.
I was working at an interactive agency in NYC during the dot.com bubble (1995-2000). The year was 1999 and the boom was in full swing! Our small agency of ten people was bought out by an international company and relocated downtown.
We moved to an office building on Madison Ave near Union Square. It was an old dressmaking building with thick, round columns scattered throughout the floors. Lots of money had been thrown around to make these open spaces unique. On one floor, they had built pizza slice desks -- desks radiated from each column. We could peek between dividers to talk to our fellow column-mates.
I worked in one of those pizza slices. One of my neighbors was Andrea Dezso, a quirky designer originally from Romania who was constantly drawing characters influenced by her native land’s fairy tales. Interesting side note: she is now a professor at one of the top art schools in the US, Rhode Island School of Design.
One day, I walked over to ask her a question about some project and noticed she was looking at something unusual on her computer - it was a web page that was mostly blank except for a logo and a large entry box. I was curious, since most pages at the time were crammed full of stuff. She told me it was a new search engine that she was using called Google!
It’s funny how points in time stick in one’s memory. I was starting my career journey in the interactive field at the same time as one of the foundational internet companies was also establishing itself. Google was founded in 1998. Remembering this point in time makes me feel that I was taking part, no matter how tangentially, in a significant period of internet history. Pretty cool!