While I’m only able to prove that I have exactly 7 years of blog entry archives (minus a day), there are about two years worth of missing archives that are on some Zip disk or floppy somewhere – formats I’m no longer able to read even if I could find the right disk. The michaelbuffington.com domain has been around since 99, and before that I was writing my personal “plan” on stompzine.com, a punk/ska music review site I ran long ago.

Calling it a “plan” wasn’t original – I was playing a lot of Quake at work, and I followed the “.plans” of the developers (I think that’s what they were called). Basically, people like John Carmack would use their “plans” to announce what new changes to the game were coming and talk about known issues with hardware, etc. Eventually they started getting more verbose, and began talking about how they just bought a new Ferrari, or were taking helicopter lessons. This was my first peak into what eventually turned into the blog format. That was in mid 1995, and I emulated the act almost immediately upon seeing it.

Over the years it never occurred to me that there was this gigantic thing percolating with weblogs. I had heard the term weblog and then eventually blog and it never occurred to me that this was what I had been doing for a couple of years already. I found sites from people like Jason and Matt, and never once assumed it would be as big as it is today (only a few people did back then).