On October 9th of 2002, I walked into a downtown Bangor office and met Joe DiStefano and Scott Traylor.

The Beginning

I saw a job listing on the Sephone website and decided to send a resume. Joe called me in a few days, a meeting was set. I paid $1.34 a gallon for gas and travelled sound on I-95 to Bangor. On the radio a listened to a little talk/news radio. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down around 7300, because of war fears and other worries related to 9/11. After my first meeting with Joe and Scott, it was agreed I would sub-contract on a few projects.

I left with my first project assignment. It was a simple catalog to replace a printed paper version for a furniture dealer. I worked on it for a bit and returned in a week to deliver my work. This time I met Kelly. Over the next few weeks this pattern would continue, me working a little bit on the side and coming down once a week to talk about the next project. The pattern ended on December 2 of 2002, that would be my first day as a Sephone full time employee.

Changes

Since my early days with Sephone, lots of things have changed. I have changed as a person a lot, changed political views, worldview/religious views, moved back to my hometown, got married, bought a house, and had a kid. The internet has changed just as much as I have, maybe more. In 2002, there was no social media, no twitter, no facebook, no youtube, not even myspace. Many people accessed the internet via dial-up, outside of cities, dial-up may have been the only choice even.

Mobile? What mobile, most people were not even sending text messages yet.

There were more search engines then, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo, Lycos, and Google. Now it’s all but a two horse race (Bing and Google). In 1998 Google was founded, many consider that the start of the modern search engine optimization era. In 2002 though, SEO work seemed quite a bit easier.

Internet Explorer version 6 had an 80% market share then, and web standards were pretty poor. Table based layout was the norm, there no javascript libraries, php frameworks, ajax, or CSS grid frameworks. The sun was setting on frames, but many still used them. It actually was a somewhat poor time on a technical level to jump into the industry, but a fun time, because many awesome things were about to happen.

It’s fun to reflect on that era.