In 1996 the Internet allowed my personal learning to go on steroids. For two years I perused industry sites and ate up any morsels of information that I could get my hands on. Then in 1998 I ran into a Wall.
Work continued to be a drag in 1998 with the exception of two hombres. Tom and Steve. My title was commercial service manager and Tom and Steve were high end service techs. They also shared my passion to learn. The three of us discovered The Wall at DanHolohan.com. This was the name of the area on Dan's site where others in our industry who were as passionate to learn as us, hung out. It has evolved today to HeatingHelp.com. It was beautiful man. Then we got the idea to launch our own site. The goal was to get people from every corner of our industry to join in our community to share information, knowledge and ideas.
One day, Tom was working in his garage. He was always performing experiments with electronic and mechanical objects. His neighbor walked into his laboratory and said, "My God Tom, this looks like AREA 51!" In January of 1999, AREA51HVAC.COM debuted.
In the beginning we envisioned ourselves sitting inside a cave around a huge campfire that overlooked Groom Lake. We used poetic license, our lake had water (the cave also had many air vents). As folks would come to visit our site, they would take a seat around the campfire. Knowledge, information and ideas turned into stories. And stories turned into learning. The atmosphere was electric, eclectic and energetic.
Soon however, we began to run out of room inside of the cave. So we built a Starship...
Comments