Oh..........Happy Anniversary!

Or, where's Barney Rubble and the Bedrock 5 so they can sing.

I was just sitting at the old ‘puter, listening to some tunes on the Media Player while my wonderful wife was watching Rachel Ray, and it hit me like a fast running Lionel train. It was on this date, December 31, 1996, when Adrienne said, lets get hooked up to the Internet. And so we did.

Back then we had a 386 computer with a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive. That’s right I said 40 megabytes. I think we paid some outlandish amount of money for that hard drive. We loaded the AOL start-up disc into the 3 ½ inch floppy drive (remember those things) and signed on at a lighting fast 9600 baud speed. The rest is history.

The very first web site I went to was the Lionel Trains web page. I had the URL from a Lionel catalog from 1986. I think it took two weeks for the web page to load up back then. Talk about your coffee break. A day or two later, I established my own E-mail
and Delwoodjef was born.

It was a few weeks later when I put out a requests somewhere on AOL for information on a DooWop message board. I got an E-mail from a guy named DooWopPop; he directed me to the DooWop Diner on the AOL Message Boards and the insanity grew from there.

My reputation as a master of misspelling grew and grew; I believe I crowned myself with the label, “The Butcher of Spelling.” A short time after that I got the name “The DooWop PostMan.” I can’t tell you how many people thought I worked for the Post Office. Wish I did.

I remember when I had my old web site and I did a “Vocal Group Gallery” page that took four weeks and six pots of coffee to load up on that old computer; even the next system I got crawled along with that 56K modem.

12 years later, we all speed around the Internet at lightning fast rates. The old web site is long gone, although I still have the individual pages on discs. I would recreate it but I was chastised by a web designer for poor design techniques. Back in 1998, it was bright colors and flashy graphics for me. Today I’m proud to be a part of the blogesphere, sharing what I know about this great music of the 50’s and 60’s, some thoughts on baseball cards, a lot about Lionel Trains, and anything else I feel like talking about.

I’d already reacquainted myself with several old friends through this blog. So it looks initially to be a good thing. As I said earlier, I’m looking forward to 2009 and some things I’ve wanted to do on the Internet for a long time.

So, please stand by.