That I needed to create a Web site was clear to me from the moment I discovered that such a thing was possible. The idea that someone without any programming background could create a site at little or no cost fascinated me.

My first and only HTML lesson was from Andrew Witt, who had learned some basic HTML tags in a computer science class at his school.

You can find some of my older sites historically preserved here.

I convinced him to write a few of them down with explanations for me. This allowed me to start making some sense of people's source code, by which I learned everything else.

I created my first site in 1995 or 1996 on Tripod, one of the original free hosting services. I didn't have Internet at home, so I had to bring my pages to school on a disk to upload them. I have reworked and expanded my pages countless times since then, and some of my old pages are still scattered around.

The name autofish came to me at school one day while I was half awake. At that time, I was getting to sleep around 5AM because of work and had class at 8:30. In its primal form, the name was longer: autochronopsychomagmafish. I didn't have a use for the name immediately, but when it became feasible to register my own domain, the name choice required no deliberation.

b a c k