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Happy 5th Anniversary Youth Tech!
It’s been five years since Youth Tech launched on America Online. Three of those years on AOL and now two years on the web! Wow, where does the time go? I thought it would be fun to reflect a little bit and take everyone for a little trip down memory lane. Lets start by saluting all of the YTCC's (Youth Tech Community Crew) over the years. Without these volunteers, Youth Tech would not be what it is today!
August
1996 . . .
This was an exciting time for Youth Tech and all involved. Any day now we were going to go live on AOL! After a few delays we finally got the word, we were live! Keyword YT Worked! We opened the chat room with anticipation and began the long process of building up our community with members. This was back when AOL was still charging by the hour, back when there was no teen channel. There were plenty of areas for kids in KO but YT was basically the first forum on AOL that was not only designed for teens but also designed and ran by Teens.
Jeremy spent all of his time working on Youth Tech back in those days, with very little time for anything else. Youth Tech was a dream that he was able to turn into reality, even back then at the age of 15. Can you imagine being 15 and somehow convincing a multi million dollar corporation like America Online to not only listen to your ideas, but to take them seriously? I’m sure it wasn’t an easy task, but one that proved to be well worth the effort. We had a small crew back then, mostly a few people that came with us from Talk City.
We were all filled with excitement and expectation those first few weeks. Of course most didn’t know we even existed yet, so we had to wait patiently to see these expectations fulfilled. Each day we would sit in the chat room waiting for the hand full of people that may or may not wander through.
Of
course YT was more than just chat we had a Tech
Area,
Message
Boards,
Binary
Corner,
Fun
Stuff ,a back to school area and much more. We even did some Seasonal
Areas.
About a month later, we were in the room one day and the strangest thing
happened… we didn’t have 5 people, we didn’t have 10 people, we had
a full room!
Wow! 47 people and plenty more waiting to get in. It seems we had finally gotten the
front page promo
we had been
looking for.
It was amazing to see our room hopping full of people, eager
to
find out what this Youth Tech thing was all about.
From that first full chatroom day forward, we were on our way to becoming one of the most popular teen areas online.
