Saturday, February 8, 2014

A Blast From the Past

Doesn't time fly! Around the end of August 1994 Lief Bluck and I put together a web site for our department. That may not sound very interesting, but let's put things in perspective.

Our University didn't have a web site - not many universities did. The Department of Physics & Astronomy here at Uvic had one - that was it. There were, I believe only 6 economics groups in the world that had a website when we got in on the act. The best known one was that run by Hal Varian - then at the University of Michigan - and now Chief Economist at Google.

Our site was a modest affair. Here's the kicker - we had to show people how to use it, and persuade them that this WWW thing may be around for a while!

Recently, Lief discovered a hard copy of this old memo. that he circulated to members of our department a few weeks after we got things going: