So you want to know more about pointw.com. It is a place for stuff.

It all started in the mid-90s. I had recently closed my BBS and was looking to get more into this internet thing. Back then the the internet was called the “information superhighway”. We use highways to get from point A to point B. Because of hyperlinks there is no space between point A and point B on the Web – only point W.

I spun up a mail server and created my shiny new email address michael@pointw.com

So proud of the cleverness, but regretted it pretty quickly. Try telling someone your email address with the word “point” in it.

……Me: My email address is “michael at point w dot com”
……Them: (writes down michael@.w.com)

Over the years since, I’ve morphed pointw.com into a bunch of things stacked on a bunch of technologies I wanted to just play with. If you are still reading at this point, you may as well know the rest of the story…

• 1998-2005 – best left in the dustbin of history. If the words FrontPage, Visual Interdev, DBase IV and FoxPro make you quiver, you know what I’m talking about.

• 2005 – created a Drupal site to host things for my team and for friends. It wasn’t much to look at unless you logged in.

• 2012 – I accidentally published something publicly and got some nice feedback. So I started pushing some more stuff publicly. This was the beginning of pointw.com as you see it today. I didn’t push a lot over the years – mostly internal/private stuff. You can see the old site on the Wayback Machine (2012), (2018).

• 2018-2020 – the ancient PC I was hosting the site on started to die. I was working with a different team than the site was originally created for, so I let it stay mostly dead.

• 2020 – a friend of a friend asked me to make a website for them. It felt dumb that I didn’t have a solid website of my own that I could point to. So I spun up a new server and created what you’re looking at now, using WordPress. Started (slowly) putting up content about stuff I’m interested in – this time public facing first. The place is a bit of a mess right now. Every week month or so I may tidy things up a bit more, add more stuff. See how it goes. If you find anything interesting, feel free to let me know at michael@pointw.com (that’s p-o-i-n-t-w dot com)