1. Propellerheads software team (creator of ReBirth and Reason)’s original website where each developer had a .plan file he would update with the details of whatever problem he was working on at the time
2. umich .plan files, which my geek friends filled in with status messages, funny quotes, and textual versions of their one-page homepages.
3. the unix ‘who‘ and ‘w‘ commands that showed you who was logged in and exactly what program they were running right now
4. the serialized “life in a startup” horror stories and rants of jwz.org
5. luny’s blog site house of the moon, the first real “blog” (although it wasn’t called that at the time) that i can remember reading
6. neal stephenson’s Snow Crash, specifically hiro’s ‘bigboard’ command that displayed a thumbnail sketch of a person’s history and present simply by knowing their name

now fast-forward to today where we Google as if by instinctive twitch.