O'Reilly Network: Googling Your Email [Oct. 07, 2002]

Someday we'll tell our grandchildren about those moments of epiphany, back in the last century, when we first glimpsed how the Web would change our relationship to the world. For me, one of those moments came when I was looking for an ODBC driver kit that I knew was on a CD somewhere in my office. After rifling through my piles of clutter to no avail, I tried rifling through AltaVista's index. Bingo! Downloading those couple of megabytes over our 56K leased line to the Internet was, to be sure, way slower than my CD-ROM drive's transfer rate would have been, but since I couldn't lay my hands on the CD, it was a moot point. Through AltaVista I could find, and then possess, things that I already possessed but could not find.