ArsDigita University at 25: Some Additional Thoughts
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2026-07-13 17:46 +0000
I did a few things this summer:
- I published an article on Medium, ArsDigita University: 25 Years Later. I did this not because I like Medium, but because I thought it was the best - ahem - medium to display that kind of content. An endless amount of thanks is due to not only the students who sent me answers to my questions, but also to Shai Simonson, who responded right away (on Linkedin!) and was very supportive of the whole thing.
- I also put up something I wrote twenty years ago on the same topic here under the Archives: ArsDigita University: Five Years Later.
- By the way, I put up an Archives section which contained some of the things I posted in other forms, over the years. Some great advice; if you really want to embarrass yourself, open up your blog posts from twenty years ago and take a look. I am in the process of slowly, slowly pruning this gnarly tree of unwanted posts and broken links. These are posts that may have been written through JRoller, and then through Posterous, and then through WordPress. I was able to convert a WordPress XML backup to Markdown using this very handy javascript program, and found myself with twenty years’ posts in many different folders.
I wrote a bit about my personal experiences with ArsDigita University in the 5-year post; none of those impressions or memories have changed. I did want to point out that, with twenty-five years of time between then and now, it’s common to find people who don’t remember where we were technologically in the year 2000. Philip Greenspun’s entire claim to fame was building one of the first web development companies at a time where pages were mostly HTML, maybe some CSS, and Javascript was still considered an ‘optional’ luxury. There was no Node, no AJAX, no JQuery. Only one of our classmates had a cell phone. No Facebook, no Twitter. Philip touted the idea of using SOAP XML to scrape Amazon for prices, and we couldn’t get our collective heads around that idea yet.
Our graduation wasn’t until mid-July, and then we all went our separate ways. Some of my classmates wrote about their time after ADUni like “oh, I found a job, it was pretty easy etc etc.” I do not recall it being easy at all. Not at all. We finished in July and I was asking about part-time work in a coffee shop down the street a week later. I wound up doing temp work at Harvard. Oh, and then 9/11 happened. Our entire economy felt like it was under attack. I didn’t get a real IT job until next February, right around the time that ArsDigita the corporation folded itself up like a card table.
Twenty-five years! It’s been a wild ride since ADUni, and I’m glad that I was a part of it.
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