In January 1995 the whole web was small enough to read like a village.

The web crossed into 1995 with something like ten thousand sites on it. You could almost picture visiting all of them. From where I sat, that smallness was the whole opportunity. A place that small still has empty lots.

Microsoft walked into CES that January and showed off Bob, a friendly cartoon face bolted onto the operating system. It flopped. But the instinct behind it, that computers had to become approachable or they would stay a hobby, was right. The companies that won the next decade were the ones that made the machine feel like it was waiting for you, not testing you.

I was not building operating systems. I was paying attention to names. When a frontier is this new, the map has not been drawn yet, and the people who show up early get to name the streets.

FILL: what were you actually doing in the first weeks of 1995, before the internet went public in India?