Gregory Todd Williams

Ten years ago today, I was hired at Cnation (née CyberNation). Some of my fondest memories come from those early Cnation days, and I’m really quite happy that I still get chances to spend time with (and sometimes work with) a lot of the original Cnation crowd. Some of my work-related memories from the early Cnation days rattle around my head enough that I thought I’d list just a few of the more interesting ones:

• Maintaining the Honda website with Adam was a lot of work, and a lot to be proud of. In 1996, the Honda site was an ~800 page site that was maintained entirely by hand with the use of BBEdit. “Color your Car” rocked, and I enjoyed following that work with a javascript-powered page that enabled you to customize a photo of a CR-V by checking off a list of accessories and options. Unfortunately, Honda’s ad agency didn’t like the “live” javascript version and asked for a version with a submit button instead.
• I remember doing lots of work on video game related sites including Capcom, Konami, Activision and 3dfx. One of the best parts about this was having access to a manufacturer-modded Playstation and playing games like Star Gladiator and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.
• Speaking of games, I really miss all the games we used to play. It was a great time for games on the Mac, and I often wish those games were still around and still playable. (You will never know how much time I’ve wasted trying to get those old games to play on old versions of Mac OS on old [and new] hardware.)

Oddly enough, while some of the specifics have changed, these days I often find myself working on the same programming problems that I spent most of my time at Cnation working on.

On September 18^th, I used to bring cookies in for everyone in the office to say thank you. It started with Mrs. Fields cookies from Santa Monica Place which I walked past every day on my way from school to work. After Cnation moved out to Beverly Hills, I would stop by Diddy Riese and pick up a giant box of cookies. Sadly, I no longer live in LA (where almost all of the Cnation gang has been sucked into working at Shopzilla), but if you read this and used to work at Cnation, go have a cookie today and remember all the great times we had.