15 years on the internet.

This June will make the mark the 15 th year my web site has been a part of the world wide web. The first two years were hosted by a company called SlipNet and my web site was www.slipnet.com/~szeles . But after two years I broke down and bought my own domain szeles.com for a whopping $100. My friends thought I was crazy and said why pay for a domain when you get one for free on AOL? 

The same year I bought my domain, I bought a pentium 90 computer that cost more that a 50 inch TV at the time. The pentium 90  had just came out and had a 500 megabyte hard drive. My wife was a print broker at the time, and one of their clients was Pinnicle. Pinnicle had just come out with a video capture card for the home computer but needed a very fast computer to run it. Adobe had a video editing  program called Premier and had just released a new version that worked with digital video. After finding the right drives to work with the program and my video board I was off and running . The first few clips were less then two minutes and to render them from VHS to digital video so that I could use on the internet took about two hours. But I found that people loved the clips and at the time it was one of the few hypnosis web sites that had any video of stage hypnosis. About two weeks later I took some still pics from the videos and created the first stage hypnosis web site to sell videos of their performance. it took me two days to get both pages up and I had a gig the next day so my wife and my self went back on the road for two weeks. I use to post on my web site were and when I was performing, so common sense told me not to put the dates I was out of town and where I lived. So I rented a post office box where clients could send the contracts back. We went to the PO Box when we got back home and found thirty request for copies of the two videos. Over the years I would add clips of shows and have ten show for sale in rotation.  I shot and sold the shows with the complete show from start to stop including the induction and to this day I still have some of the same people buying the DVD's You can still see all my web sites over the year at waybackmachine.org by typing in szeles.com .