October 5th marks the 15th anniversary of my first weekly About the Internet column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. For those of you who are too young to remember, newspapers were kind of like blogs printed on paper with the added benefit that they could be used for lining bird cages and cleaning windshields (try doing that with your iPad!).

That first column introduced readers to GeoCities, a free hosting company based around various themed “cities.” My home page was among the art pages in Paris. GeoCities later sold for $3.5 billion in stock only to join several other failed ventures in the Yahoo! scrap heap in 2009. Which brings up my biggest regret about the column. If I had bought just one share of every company I mentioned during the three years the column ran, I’d be writing this from a private island.

I wrote about Webcrawler which was bought by AOL. I made constant fun of AOL which is still the butt of many jokes but at one time the people running Time Warner thought it was worth half their company. I covered Yahoo!’s IPO (I surprised the company’s PR flack by knowing the number of sites in the directory when that info was supposed to be secret – I counted them) and noted the appearance of an upstart search engine, Google. I also enjoyed myself by pointing out that Amazon.com had never turned a profit (it has now).

Of course, the real point of the whole column was fun and that’s what most of the columns (several of which are still available online at Net Detours) focused on. Here are a few of the highlights:

• A guy selling a used Russian spacecraft.
• Sites devoted to helping users learn the Macarena
• Net Rhymes and spoofs of famous literature such as Gatesy @ the Bat and Yes Virginia, Explorer is Part of the Operating System
• An open letter to Martha Stewart
• The occasional Ask Dr. Web column and Net Quiz (Is HTML really the German acronym for Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco?)
• And so much more

It was a time when the Internet was fun rather than simply another mass media and it was great to be able to share it with a few loyal readers. So I’d like to thank the Post-Dispatch and especially Ellen Futterman for being willing to give a guy from the News Art Department a shot at a weekly column, fellow artist Chuck Groth for encouraging me to give it a try, my boss Tony Lazorko for not noticing (or ignoring) the fact I was occasionally writing the column instead of doing my actual job and my wife Christee for being my proof reader, worst critic and best fan.

While moving my office (a project comparable to an Indiana Jones archeological dig) it occurred to me that I might be a Designosaur. Now, the Urban Dictionary defines a Designosaur as, “A graphic designer who is behind the times in learning the latest technology. An outmoded artist or designer on the way to being extinct.” But I don’t buy it.To me a designosaur is a designer who traces his roots back to the pre-digital era, the days of T-squares, stat cameras and dry-transfer lettering.Sure a lot of Designosaurs have fossilized but some of us have, like T-Rex becoming a chicken, evolved to thrive in the digital age. With that definition in mind…

You might be a Designosaur if you:

1. Wear your X-acto scars with pride.
2. Own a set of technical pens. Extra points if they work
3. Own pencils that aren’t #2s or, for that matter, have ever used a #2 for something other than standardized testing.
4. Have a drafting table which functions as anything other than just another horizontal surface.
5. Own a blue pencil.
6. Ever made one letter out of another because you’d used up every “r” on your sheet of Letraset.
7. Used to consider a one-week turn-around a “rush job.”
8. Hear the phrase “bikini waxing” and think of doing paste up on tourism ads.
9. Have discussed starting a graphic design history museum with the inventory of your storage closet. Exhibits would include:
   • Technical Pens
   • T-square
   • Parallel Rule
   • 45 degree and 30/60/90 degree triangles
   • French and flexible curves
   • Sizing wheel
   • Rubylith
   • Dry transfer (rub off) lettering (complete with burnishing tool)
10. Know that Pink Pear is not a sixties rock band.