1999 - 2009, Ten years of AfterDawn
It has been ten years now since our site, AfterDawn.com, was launched back in June, 1999. To celebrate this event, I went through our extensive collection of news articles from the past ten years and tried to somehow summarize what has happened in the world of "digital entertainment" during our site's existence -- and what has happened to our site during that time. This can be considered as my personal "memoir" of what has happened to our site during the past ten years, and also serves as our "birthday news article" for today.
Digital music
Our site was originally built around the (back then) newly developed audio compression technology called MP3. I personally had my first encounter with this magical little acronym back in Autumn, 1996, when I was (ab-)using our school's Net access and surfing the wonderful (but quite small, compared to current one) World Wide Web. Found lists of anonymous FTP sites' addresses and went through them to see what I might find (for those of you who got to the Net much later on, I'd like to note that yes, there were online piracy years and years before the appearance of P2P networks, Pirate Bay and others -- actually, to be correct, there was online piracy years before the WWW too). Found sites that contained latest singles from popular artists, using a never-heard-of file extension, .mp3. Read more...
