It was the wee hours of Friday morning, one of those nights where sleep wasn’t happening and I ended up down a Wayback Machine rabbit hole instead. On a whim I typed in bootupcomputers.com just to see what, if anything, was still out there.
The current live version is basically nothing — just a parked “something amazing will be constructed here” placeholder. But buried a few snapshots back, from June 15, 2012, was the real thing: my old “Boot Up!” homepage, built back when I was deep in my IBEW electrician apprenticeship, still finding my way around Hawaii, and running my little corner of the internet with a Pandora radio widget, a couple of embedded G4TV videos, and a hit counter, because that’s just what you did in 2012.
Reading through it now is a trip. The bio is basically a time capsule of exactly where I was — third year into my apprenticeship with Watanabe Electric, chasing my Journeyman’s license, still finding my footing as “NY2Honolulu.” Half the widgets on the page are for services that don’t even exist anymore (RIP G4TV, RIP the old Twitter widget, RIP Pandora’s sidebar player), which somehow makes it more charming, not less.
I rebuilt it as faithfully as I could from the archive — same banner, same nav buttons, same stations list, same everything — so it’s below for anyone curious what this site looked like a decade-plus ago. Old, but a goody.
