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American Road Magazine
Celebrating our two-lane highways of yesteryear…And the joys of driving them today!

Google Inspired Flashbacks


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A recent post at Ron Warnick's Route 66 News concerned Google's 10th anniversary and the 2001 indexes (the oldest they have) they've made available. You can search like it's 2001 here.

 

Of course, Ron's post was about Route 66 websites of long ago and it really brought back some memories. I remember three websites from my early Route 66 searches. Two of them, Swa Frantzen's Historic 66 and the National Federation site are still around but the third, exmachina.net, has long been gone. But it was still around in 2001 and I was delighted to find it in the Google flashback. I'm not sure but I believe it was run by Bob Moore since it seemed organized around “A Guidebook to the Mother Road” that he and Patrick Grauwels wrote. One of exmachina's features was a set of postcards that you could email to people with your own message. In 1999, I sent these to the two friends who were sharing my trip as a sort of countdown to departure. I found the postcard page on the archived site but the ability to send them is gone.

 

So I dug through my own archives and found copies of those messages. Then I made my own flashback. This is a composite of samples I sent to myself including a shot of Juan Delgadillo in the Snow Cap that's not all that different from this picture that I took in 2003. This contains some of the "countdown" postcards. Note the change of my own email address in the last message as I changed ISPs in order to try posting my first trip report.

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My Internet flashbacks stretch to about 1990, when I first got Internet access. I posted to USENET newsgroups like a fool, mostly in rec.radio.broadcasting, bit.listserv.techwr-l, rec.autos, and rec.autos.driving. The oldest USENET posting I could make Google find is from 1992, about the double-height radios in GM cars.

 

USENET contains the first words I wrote about what was then a beginning-to-bud interest in the old roads. I was in eastern Ohio trekking back to Indiana from New Jersey when I dove off I-70 and followed US 40 for a while... right up until I unexpectedly found I-70 built right on top of it!

 

US 40 in Ohio Story

 

jim

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