It’s hard to believe that it’s been twenty years since I registered my first domain name.

The year was 1995, and after having been on dial-up services for 15 years, I heard about this new thing called the World Wide Web.

After attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that January, I knew that I had to create this thing called a website.

I had been publishing an ezine featuring software reviews and setting up a website seemed like the next logical step.

The domain I choose was called WorldVillage.com, and it featured family-friendly content which included software reviews, related articles and online games (primitive though they were.)

I recently discovered an old VHS tape in my WorldVillage and early online-business memorabilia box. I discovered a way to digitize the content and have uncovered a number of vintage television clips that featured me or my site.

What was it like in the early years of the web and what did I have to say about it?

Let’s take a look…

The oldest clip was from CBS News Up-to-the-Minute, a national program that featured a segment called The Digital Drive. In this piece, CBS mentioned WorldVillage as a family-friendly site and showed a few of the pages. The quality of the video isn’t very good and even drops out at one point, but it is entertaining to see how rudimentary the pages were and how slowly they loaded.

Back in 1996, I was one of the first to create a system where people could send a digital greeting card to another via the web. It was created for Mother’s Day and was called the “Digital Hug.” PC-TV picked up on the feature and mentioned it in this clip.

While living in the Dallas area, I became acquainted with a show called NetTalk Live. It was hosted by a guy named Jovan and his sidekick Laura Lewis. Leveraging a very early version of Mark Cuban’s AudioNet service (soon to become Broadcast.com), the show billed itself as the first Triplecast. That is, a broadcast simultaneously aired on TV, Radio AND the Internet.

In this longer piece, I was invited into the studio to talk about my website and my first published book, Internet Family Fun: The Parent’s Guide to Safe Surfing.

As the popularity of my site grew, I was contacted by other broadcast networks. In this clip, I was interviewed for a PBS special on child safety. They wanted to speak with me for a segment on how parents can keep kids safe on the internet.

While living in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1999, one of the lead Oklahoma City networks (KOCO-TV) featured me in this piece.

And finally, a Denison, Texas TV network came out to my place to interview me about my online business.

It’s amazing how quickly time has flown by, and I have to laugh a bit as I see myself all those years ago.

But it also excites me to know that I had the privilege of being a part of something new and exciting at the very beginning.

Here’s to the next twenty years!