Can it really be 20 years ago that I had the strange idea of writing a weekly series of self-published essays and sending them out first via email, then via a variety of Web technologies? Time flies. Last year I began the celebrations early with a column that looked at some of the lessons I have learned from online publishing all these years. More recently, I wrote about some of the influential people that I have had the opportunity to interview.

In a retrospective column that I wrote in 2006, I recalled how back in 1995 we had browsers that were just beginning to display tables and images in-line, and Netscape was still the dominant force in browsing technology. We also had PCs that still booted from floppy disks, and FTP and Gopher were the dominant Internet protocols.

When it came to broadband, there wasn’t much of it in 1995. ISDN was still found in more places than DSL. In another retrospective column, I wrote that finding an Internet service provider wasn’t easy. Most of us got online via dial-up modems: there was no Wifi, no iPhones or any other smartphones that could do anything besides voice calls. Blackberries hadn’t yet been invented, and many of us used pagers when we wanted someone to get in touch with us because the mobile minutes were expensive. Most of the world still relied on land lines.

They were certainly simpler times: cybersquatting, phishing, ad banner tracking, malware exploit kits and cookie stuffing were all relatively unknown concepts. Blogs hadn’t been invented, nor podcasts, wikis, or mashups. We were still using Yahoo to search the Internet.

Back in 1995, there were no music or video streaming services, and Napster and its peer-to-peer cousins hadn’t yet been invented either. Here is an column from 2000 where I offer some lessons to be learned from Napster, sadly little of this advice took hold. In the past 20 years, as I wrote last fall, music has gotten more mobile, more discoverable, and now streaming is here to stay. One evidence of this is that Kate Mulgrew is now better known for her role as a imprisoned Russian crime boss rather than as a starship captain, thanks to the streaming Netflix series.

The Web enabled an entire eCommerce industry. In those early days, as I wrote in this retrospective, the websites were wacky, the software shaky, and the tools touchy and troublesome. Now most of us don’t give it a second thought that we can buy something with a browser and a credit card. We have lots of new payment systems, including Square and phone-based wallets, and even bitcoin: a new form of money that is entirely online.

Certainly, the biggest changes in the past 20 years have been how we collaborate on our work. Back then if our teams weren’t all under one roof, there were painful remote access tools that slowly moved information around. We spent a lot of time sending large graphics files around on our network because there wasn’t any other way to share them. In many ways, back then we were still in the dark ages of collaboration tools. Now I can bring together a staff from all over the world with almost free and quite capable tools. (Last week I mentioned some of the great people that I have had the honor of working with.)

Thanks to all of you loyal readers who have stuck with me all these years, and all the kind (and even not-so-kind) words and thoughts you have sent my way after I pen another of these columns. What a long, strange trip it’s been but– you know me well enough by now — I will keep on truckin’.