Chapter One in the History of PC
The date is March 1st, 1996. I am Michael Ponte. I am on America Online and I have discovered the magic of the Internet. It was just a matter of time before I discovered the part of AOL called Personal Publisher. This is a tool which allows you to create and manage webpages.
Armed with 5 Megabytes of webspace, I created the Fremen Sietch- a page dedicated to the famous Science Fiction Novel series called Dune. It was a modest page and unfortunately, It was not that expansive. I decided to take a cue from the Absurd Gallery (Does it still exist?) and build an additional section for a gallery dedicated to strange pictures and stories from around the internet. I dubbed it Ponte Central Station- The place where everything comes together. The addition of these pictures lead to a rapid reduction of Dune material. It eventually disappeared all together.
For the period ranging from May 1996- June 1997, Ponte Central Station was based in www.members.aol.com/MPonte1006/Arrakis.html and all was well. Then I got a new idea for 1997.
By the time July 1997 came around, I had graduated High School and was preparing for college. I was working at a place called Chad's Chowderhouse. There I came to know a man named Sean Walsh. He was a cook and was attending college as well. He and I both had a similar love, screwing bloody corpses. After that we discovered another love- Star Wars and Lampooning it!
Sean had already been writing a series of short stories based on Star Wars Characters. I had read, and loved them all. Around this time, I was thinking of what to do with my webpage. I dropped "Station" and re-named it Ponte Central- the name which stays with it to this day.
I decided at this time to break PC up into several sections- each dedicated to a decade. There was PC57, PC67, PC77, PC87, and PC97- all united by a section called PC2000. This section premiered in October of 1997. Each "section" would chronicle the news and entertainment from the different time periods they represented. PC 1987 had a picture of Ronald Reagan. This soon proved to be a very difficult thing to manage. The Decade era died on January 1st, 1998.
Over the 3 month span from October 97 to January 98, I had about 20 different sections. Some survived 1997, but most did not. What was waiting in the future was something that I had never even imagined. It was then that I reached a level of creativity that is still unmatched. I turned to my age old love- Star Wars