I found evidence of the day this website was born. It appears to have occurred either after midnight on December 5, 1995, or else on December 6. This posting from one of my earliest websites makes it look like I started writing the night of December 4, then kept on writing until after midnight. The filename for the posting is “december4.html”, but the title of the posting is “December 6, 1995”. I consider it more likely that I started this posting on December 4 and finished it on December 6, when I would have written this bit:

I do not specifically remember this incident involving a call from 212-509-5559, and at first I had no idea how I would have known the call came from a payphone. I had no caller ID in 1995, and even if I did a payphone would not have sent out such specific and lengthy information.

But I remember now. A couple of friends from college knew I had a thing for payphones, and sometimes when they found one they would call in to my answering machine and leave a message announcing the payphone’s number and location. I described the above call as “anonymous” because this person who called in didn’t want me using his name on that new-fangled Internet thing. I do not think I ever made that soundfile I promised.

As awesome as it would be if that number appeared on this site’s data museum of mostly inactive payphone numbers, it does not. Nevertheless I posthumously grant 212-509-5559 honorary title of the first payphone number ever listed on The Payphone Project.

So it’s been over 23 years since I took action on this idea of posting payphone numbers to the WWW, and probably about 25 since I first posted content someplace other than on dialup BBSes and message boards. My first forays into GEnie and the seemingly endless quantity of New York City dialup BBSes would have happened around 1992, when my involvement with a telephone confessional art project called Apology earned me an IBM XT, and not much else except for the unique experience of working on Apology. The XT was my first computer.

Reading that old stuff at The Place of General Happiness can be fun, enlightening, sad… I forgot how much I … forgot. I got a laugh out of what might be the Internet’s first-ever attempt at bringing some humor to a “404 Not Found” page.

My server-push experiments, later converted to animated gifs, demonstrated enough technical chops to get me a job at Time-Warner, where I worked for about 7 years. I might have worked at TWX longer if AOL hadn’t come along and fired 10,000 people.

I’ve thought about modernizing this, my series of announcements using then-cutting-edge meta-refresh tags and other Netscape HTML extensions. I could upgrade those pages with CSS or HTML5. But I prefer to let things show their age, as long as it still works and no security vulnerability exists.

That series of announcements lands on a page of poetry, most of it pretty bad, but I remain fond of this one, not just for its substance but for the use of HTML form’s <SELECT> <OPTION> as its vessel: YOU CAN LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR ME.

I just hit the “random link” on the old site. I can’t believe it still works. It sent me to this, a story my mother said brought tears to her eyes. Clicking the random link again sent me to the story about Alice, another of my mother’s favorites.

When I wrote the Alice story my future girlfriend was 10 years old. She started reading my site three years later, at 13, and would later say to me that Alice was her favorite character ever. I don’t know what she remembers or thinks of it now but when we were together she made it sound like she grew up with my websites and with thoughts of payphones ringing off the hook in her head. I never knew she existed until 2008, when I somehow crossed paths on Facebook with a beautiful 25-year old who happened to live a few blocks away. I would later learn we “crossed paths” by her design. We met on her 25th birthday and dated for almost three years. She’s married now with kids. We last chatted in December, when I linked her to the last Gothamist story. She said he was smiling from first word to the last, adding “That’s not an ‘Only in New York’ thing. That’s on ‘Only Mark Thomas’ thing.” That made me smile from the first word way beyond the last.