The year was 1993. I was a grad student at UK, and I was putting up my first web site. I had seen image maps on other web sites, but I didn’t really know how to make them work on my own site. So, I poked around Usenet looking for useful information, and I used the rudimentary web search tools that were available at the time. Webcrawler, if I recall correctly. I found Vivek Khera, who had written something called imagemap.cgi, which was a server-side imagemap handler.

Of course, being a clueless newbie, I could not get it working, and had do bother Dr. Khera to help me get it working. I don’t expect that he remembers this – I’m sure I was one of a horde of clueless newbies that took up his time. But he helped me get the darned thing working, and was one of the many important forces that moved me on a path to webby stuff.

So, yesterday, I received notification that he had signed my GPG key, and I suddenly made the connection. We had met at OSCon, and I didn’t make the connection there.

So, a public Thank You to Vivek, and to all of the other folks that helped a clueless newbie 10 years ago. I would not be where I am right now (in a very cold conference room for an ApacheCon planners meeting) without your help.