"Wow...this is kind of an "old school" website...Do people still care about this stuff?  Isn't this TLDR?  (Too long, didn't read)

Yes -- I got this in an email from a hipster "intellectual" who really knows a great deal about everything.  This is pretty much how I responded, without the expletives.

Why we still support GuitarAttack

The year was 1998.  I was living with my family in Texas.  I built my first guitar and I was really excited about it.

I was trying to drag my colleagues at work into the 1990s and I was learning HTML coding on my own.  I built an HTML front-end for a mess of a server we used to post our files.  It wasn't very elegant, but it was functional.  I decided to start a website to chronicle my guitar work.

There was no Facebook.  There was no WordPress.  Blogger wasn’t around (the word hadn't been invented).  We didn’t have MySpace.  No Twitter or YouTube or Instagram.  Cell phones were just telephones.  All there was on the internet were websites people built and text-based newsgroups.  Keep in mind that the internet was only about seven years old at this time.

Google made its premier in 1998.   My search engine of choice back then was Alta Vista.  There were only about 2,500,000 websites when I started working on GuitarAttack.com.

http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/#trend

At this time, there was a great deal of interest in the internet, but it was in its infancy.  There is also some folklore about the era.  For example, during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999, when asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Vice President Gore replied (in part):

“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”

So, Al Gore didn’t actually claim to invent the internet, but, in any event, GuitarAttack predated this interview. No, we didn't invent the internet.

Is a website with information still relevant?  Is a website with your own domain name worth the expense?  Have we become accustomed to getting everything online for free?  Questions to ponder. 

We may have become the equivalent of your local library.  Fine.  We all can't help but think that someone may find what we have posted interesting.  We have inspired many and there may be a few more who find this useful.

In addition, we like to bring attention to our awesome guitar pickups and our original music.  Why don't you check them out?

We don't need any more advice -- we get plenty of it.  As long as we still enjoy the conversation we'll keep the site going.

When will it all end?  Who knows, but we want to make sure we make it until at least our 20^th Anniversary in 2018.  We’re going to give something away that is really, really cool.

Thank you,

The GuitarAttack Crew

If we've inspired or helped you, let us know about it!  It may help you in the contest.