16 years on the net

16 years ago today, I left my first trace on the face of the internet. I was a posting to the Usenet newsgroup sci.crypt, and I was posting in German. Translated, the post reads:

I coded a simple encryption algorithm in Turbo-Pascal, whose sole purpose is to secure a few lines of text against the eyes of less ambitious “spys”. Anybody interested in testing it?

The response was – ahem – poor (read: zero), but it was the start of an interesting journey which has not yet ended.

Actually, the date when I got my first account on one of the Sun 3/50 workstations which were connected to the Internet, was a few months earlier – but this Usenet post is the first “jour fixe” I can tie my net presence to.