Back in 1994, the internet had existed in some form for years under different names, but commercial use had just been allowed in 1993, and I started a web hosting company in mid-1994. Because I was snot-nosed kid, however, I liked to write famous people, like Dan Perkins, a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow, who penned one of my favorite alt-weekly strips. He replied politely in February 1994, and wrote back:

> Something you may be interested in on the Internet is this new 
> distribution system for information called World-Wide Web (WWW). It 
> allows the integration of different media: sound (live and stored), video 
> (live and stored), text, graphics, etc. all through one interface. People 
> are using this progam called "Mosaic" (developed by the NCSA: National 
> Center for Supercomputing Applications...why they're doing PC 
> applications? For scientists to use to access supercomputers, apparently) 
> on Sun workstations, PCs, and Macintoshes to grab this stuff off the 
> Internet in a much more coherent form.
> 
> Anyway, the reason it might be interesting, is that you could make 
> available Tom Tomorrow materials (probably not too many actual strips, 
> because the material is too easy to screen capture or whatever and send 
> around the world) via WWW very easily. I don't know all the details of 
> setting of a WWW site, but I think it just involves putting materials in 
> the right directories in your Internet account.

The World-Wide Web, you see? Fast-forward to last year, and I helped Dan raise a huge amount of money—$137,000—representing thousands of copies of his latest collection of This Modern World cartoons! A dream to work with someone I have been a fan of so long, and became online friends with years ago.

I came across this email due to archiving. Moving yet again from a third-party email client deemed at its end of life—the third major migration in my internet period, I think (Eudora to Mailsmith to Postbox to, now, MailMaven—I archived all my older messages into a giant database. I don’t need them online and searchable in my current email client. Testing a search on Dan’s name, I came across that forgotten treasure.