So, I realize, depending on which of the half dozen web sites I wrote this story on, this is probably one of the most accurately close to the actual truth. I hope.
In 1994, America Online (then known as AOL) was charging by the minute for online service. There was, however, a free "help" section know as TechLive that stopped the per minute charge. Instead of sitting in boring chat rooms, I decided to hang out with the techs. I answered questions really, really fast, but over the course of several months, someone figured out I was 12, which was too young to even have the 13 year old plus labor laws to kick in. So AOL asked me to leave.
When I left AOL, I hung out on the regular part of the Internet, using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), writing Visual Basic scripts that scanned the chat logs for vital information (such as when my friends signed on and off) and the standard cheesy joke robots. This started my minor hobby obsession with sifting algorithms and datasets. It was fun when I learned how to monitor multiple chat rooms at once and connect the pieces between them.
In 1995, I played with HTML for an hour, got bored, yawned and went on with my life.
In the summer of 1996, Interactive Imaginations, then owners of a web site called riddler.com, decided to pull together a trial Internet advertising network. If we slapped this advertisement box on the top of our web page (which we called a banner) they would pay us 3/4 of a penny when a true human visited that web page. Then Microsoft joined in, and said they'd put in another 1/4 of a penny in, making it a full penny per pair of human eyes.
Since I only knew approximately one hour of HTML, I poked around the Yahoo directory, and found an HTML tutorial written by Marc Andreessen. I had no idea who he was at the time, but I was already using his Mosaic browser previously, and currently loading the "World Wide Web" with his new Netscape browser. His guide was written for knowledgeable college students and researchers, and I was just a kid about to start 9th grade. So I tried to figure out what I could of it. The site I posted, originally just called "Dave's Site" was a mess of random HTML code I tried to put together into some sort of coherence.
I managed to make about $90 over the first three months, which impressed my dad. I went into a really long rant about how this new advertising stuff could make "thousands" some day. (My original dream sheet maxed out at $2,000 a month, which I surpassed manyfold later on.) I wrote up a business plan of about 10 pages with a mechanical pencil, and secured $300 in Venture Capital funding. Less than a year later, once I had some nice positive cash flow, I handed $600 back to my angel investor. I would have written him a check, but I was too young to have a checking account.
The interesting part here is that around Sept 22-23 of 1996, as I was completely bored in my first month of 9th grade classes, I sat down and wrote a few quick mini lessons on making a quick web page. It was only intended as a bonus feature to the people who came to my web site. People loved it, and started putting together quick web sites for their churches and local pizzerias. And they'd write a "Thanks to Dave" link back to my site at the bottom of the page.
There's a long, long, complicated story in between that and now. Tens of millions of visitors worldwide wandered to Dave's Site for an hour or two to learn a little bit about "web design" (which was really just the coding aspect at my site). I'm figuring based on my log files, a little over a million people took my course from start to finish.
Looking back, I would have changed one major thing. I would have proofread it in the first ten million visitors. Oops.
I compiled the teachings of HTML and CSS I did over the (then 15) years and made it into an interactive application for Apple's iPad. It managed to get 4.5-star reviews. It's called "Web Design Basics." I'm fairly certain that means my skills at teaching were not a fluke. :)