My family got its first computer in 1988. It was some sort of IBM machine that was mainly used by my mom for writing Word Perfect documents. Also her and my dad began to use the predecessor to email, called “Bitnet.” Connection to Bitnet was achieved by dialing up to the university, which would connect you to telnet. This is where I first started toying around with the internet as a little kid. Through telnet you could (and still can) access Gopher, which is basically an information tool. I would connect to random library servers around the world and whatever else I could connect to. Around 1993 while in the Binghamton University library I saw a computer cluster that had a sign hanging over it that read “Information Superhighway.” This was basically the closest predecessor to the internet as we know it today. It had a clickable interface and thus didn’t require typing in nerdy commands to get places.

About two years later, in the summer of 1995 I frequently visited a Binghamton University computer cluster to play networked games with one of my neighbors and his friends such as Warcraft II. Just before leaving one afternoon, having quickly been defeated in a game I fooled around with the computer as I was sitting at and saw two applications, Mosaic 1.0 and Netscape 1.0. When I opened these I saw my first web pages. I thought this was pretty cool, and convinced my parents to sign up for AOL.

Before the summer ended I found some site called “Internet Yellow Pages” at iypn.com (no longer exists) that gave out free web space. Essentially they only allowed you to fill out a form and they would make a page for you, sort of like the page builders that many free services such as Yahoo! Geocities and Tripod have today. I created my first ever web page there, and made it for the weekly newsletter I produced for my street, which apart from one or two households, no one read.

After spending the fall in Germany while my dad was on sabbatical, I felt that it was time to step the page up a little. My friend Emil had already created a real site on his dad’s department web server about Weird Al and Aerosmith. Netscape 3.0 Gold had come out and had a built-in web page creator. I created a slightly more complex site than before with that and hosted it on Tripod. After a short while I created a site about myself as well. This site existed for several years until someone reported me to Tripod for advertising one of my “surfer trap” sites (explained later) in a chat room.

For two or three years I simply kept adding stuff to my personal site, mostly JavaScript that crowded up my site but had no real purpose. At one time I even translated my entire site into German and basically had a bilingual site.

After returning from a semester in Vienna in early 1999 I made some changes in terms of content. I created more and more sites that I grouped together, and called my entire site “Kai Brinker’s Web Empire,” a name that I used until recently. Many of my sites were what I called “surfer trap” sites that lured visitors to my site by claiming that I had a great site about a celebrity, hoping that they would visit other sections of my site. Also at the time there was a large craze about “get paid while you surf" sites, which paid people a few cents an hour for watching banners while they surfed the internet. The more people you referred thee more money you would make, so the “surfer trap” sites also contained tons of links to these. There were many high-frequented celebrity “top sites” at the time that would increase your ranking every time someone on your site would vote for you by following your link to their site. Of course there were many ways of deceiving these, and one site simply would increase your rating every time their image was loaded on your site. So, evil as I was I simply created a auto-refreshing page with their image on it, opened ten or so windows of it, and up to the top I went. For a few days I had hundreds visitors daily, until the rating site found out and removed me.

In April 2000 I purchased my first domain name, “newkai.com.” It was around this time that they finally became affordable and I bought it for $35 a year. Currently I only pay $8.95 a year for each of my domain names! Eventually I got tired of the whole “surfer trap” junk and focused the site back on me. Nowadays I want people who visit my site to visit because of me and not because of some cheap link site. I sort of neglected my site for most of 2000 and 2001, although in December 2000 I started a daily weblog, which is still carried on today. In the fall of 2001 I finally bought my own web space (at the time I was hosted by GeoCities) at addr.com. This meant my site was now free of ads and could store a lot more. I overhauled my site in 2002 and again in the summer of 2003. That Summer I also started an AIS 2002 Alumni Site for my high school class. I also added the KaiCams, which initially featured a camera feeding images of me and a screen print of what was on my screen, called the “CompCam.” The CompCam was unpopular and sort of invaded privacy, especially when having IM conversations with people, so I discontinued it. Initially the photos were hosted on my Addr web server, but now they are feed directly from my computer. I also added live video in November and repositioned the camera to show the common room of my suite. In late December I added a second cam, feeding from my new digital camcorder.

Nearly all of the content on my websites may be used for free elsewhere, provided you give me credit. This is explained in the licence below. The exception is content posted on my forums such as AISVIENNA.COM and AIS2002.COM by people other than me. This is under their copyright, and you will have to ask for their permission to use it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.