The Beginning - Feb 3, 1995
It started with a challenge. Recovery from a major operation in the Spring of 1994 curtailed Becky Swann's primary business. For ten years she had been a Real Estate Agent, most recently an Exclusive Buyer's Agent. Following the operation she began spending more and more time communicating to friends via her PC, becoming involved with the "On Computers" Radio Show where she was the Sys Op for the show's Chat Line on AOL - and, discovering the Internet.

When she signed up for a year with her first Internet Service Provider, OnRamp, there was a promise of space on their server for the development of her own web page. That didn't happen immediately. Becky called them weekly to bug them about it, "Where is my server space?"

In February of 1995 Onramp called. Becky's space was available. They then gave the challenge, "We want you to beta test our web server, and we need it by Monday."

Becky had begun working with Personal Computers in 1981, starting with one of IBM's first day orders for their just introduced PC (husband Jim was a System Engineering Representative for IBM, working with midrange computers). She used the PC to produce a club newsletter. Beginning in '89 she used most of the on-line services (Prodigy, GEnie, Compuserve, AOL) to correspond with others that were interested in writing or in real estate, and for advanced real estate applications. She was a sophisticated user, but not a programmer. Becky didn't know how to spell HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the basic tool for creating a web page.

On the other hand Becky loves challenges, especially when a new technology is involved. She promised, on a Thursday, that her web page would be up for viewing on the following Monday. In the same manner she learned CB radio, Ham radio, knitting, newsletter publishing and appraising property, she immediately headed for the book stores. Armed with several books about the Internet and HTML, half a dozen magazines covering the same topics, and a case of diet cokes, she tackled the creation of a web page.

The following Monday Becky called Jeff Smith, the President of Onramp, she invited him to view her new web page. She then crawled in bed for the first time in three days and slept for 20 hours.

That first page was little more than a resume page about herself, her grandchildren and her interests, including, of course, real estate. Upon completion of her personal home page she returned to surfing the net. How many real estate related web pages are out there, how are they designed, what services are provided. She found ten, then twenty, then thirty. At forty, Becky had trouble remembering which she had already visited and which were new. There were good ones, growing ones to which she wanted to return frequently. Others were so bad that she wanted to be able to avoid them in the future. Paper lists on Becky's desk don't work, they get absorbed by the troll living under the desk - cousin to the one there that gives birth to computer bugs. Then a new thought why not use her web site disk space for her list - she would always be able to find it. Becky's Real Estate Directory was born.