Thanks man! I started off at NASA - just before the web was invented - as a Sys Admin for their Mac computers, and then became a Multimedia Developer for them. That was when I set up one of the first web sites on the internet! Woo! Al Gore came through my office one day, and I showed him the web, how it worked, etc. They also had oodles of old supercomputers. An old Cray sat in the hallway with a built-in bench around the outside of it. Nice place to sit. Sad place to compute. :-) Fun place. Good memories.
Al Gore came through my office one day, and I showed him the web, how it worked, etc.
you're kidding, right?
Nope. Not kidding. Ames Research Center is the only Federally owned airstrip in Silicon Valley, so any time a President or VP needs to come to town, they fly into Ames. You can walk out on the apron, meet them, shake hands, etc. (At least you could then, because the facility was secure. I don't think it is any more.) The building I was in was known as the IT building, and Al Gore took a tour of it. "Multimedia" was a big deal at the time - laser discs, Macromedia Director, etc - and my group was one of the ones that they either decided to show to Gore, or he wanted to see. So we got about 10 minutes of warning, and two big dudes in suits in our office. Al Gore comes in, shakes my hand (my officemate was in the final stages of MS, and didn't really have use of his hands at that point) and asks what I am working on. I show him a Mac SE with possibly a beta distro of NCSA httpd running on it, and showed him some web pages that we were publishing for some of our scientists. He asked some questions that showed he actually understood computers, thanked me for my time, and left. It was probably not even 5 minutes. But yeah... I showed Al Gore the web.