Lev Gonick

My PhD is actually on the introduction of new technologies into traditional mining communities.

I did field work in Africa, field work in India, and field work back in Canada, which is my home country.

After a while, one of those great luxuries of being an academic, and you know it because at least in part you were in academic medicine for a while,

You know, you get these amazing things called sabbaticals.

Like, what a brilliant human creation.

Unfortunately, only academics, at least as best as I know, I guess I think in corporate IT, you get these short sabbaticals.

But anyway, I had a sabbatical in 1993, Ed.

And I had and have a special needs daughter.

And so we were trying at the time to figure out how best to get some intervention for my daughter, who's on the autism spectrum.

And it turns out that in sabbatical land, you go to try to find like a institution that might have you and you bring a chunk of your salary with you and some ideas on what you might do.

Anyway, I found myself in the fall of 1993 when my daughter was five years old at Arizona State University.

The fall of 1993, Ed, like you and I remember this, so hopefully some of your viewers and listeners will as well.

That's when the commercial internet browser was born in the fall of 1993.

So here I was on sabbatical, time on my hands, kind of a nerd, but now, you know, I was doing international affairs, I mean, and technology.

I mean, that was kind of my thing.

And I started teaching online and like nobody had actually really taught online with a browser.

I'd been teaching online and

with things before browsers, these were tools like Archie was one of the tools.

These were all before we actually had hypertext markup language that was available.

And anyway, when the browser became available, I was teaching online and I kind of went, wow, this is so cool.