Sadly, I just found out PersianKitty passed away this week. I don't usually post things like this but PK is an exception. There are not many people or moments in life that you can pinpoint where the rest of your life changed but PK is one of them.
Here is my PK story
In the fall of 1998, I was in university and we were given internet access. It was on a slow dial-up and it was a text-based browser. One of the first things I searched up was sex or porn. The first search result was PersianKitty.com. Back then when you used a text-based browser you would see the text of a website. There were no images. Instead, images would show up as a downloadable IMAGE link. It would take 30 minutes to download an image only to find out I had downloaded a banner lol. It was so frustrating. That said I surfed to the bottom of her site and saw her text webcounter which read 2,100,000 Visitors to date. I vividly remember that number. 2,100,000 Visitors. I was blown away and intrigued.
From there I stopped looking for porn. Instead, I turned my attention to starting my own website. First, I discovered out what a browser was and I did away with the text-based surfing. I learned how to code html or I should say I learned how to download someone else's code and edit it to make it look like mine. So I downloaded PK's html. Changed the logo. Uploaded the site to my university account (concordia.ca/~shap) and sought out link trades. The first person I found was Ynot Rick. We swapped links. Within a day PK's lawyer sent me a cease and desist. I couldn't believe it. She had seen my site AND she had enough money for a lawyer. This internet thing was going to be huge!
From there I removed my site and decided to start over and do things right. So I watched and learned how PK listed sites and decided to build my own. It was a cold snowy Friday in November. I had a buddy over who wanted to go toss a football around. Instead, he ended up watching as I reloaded PersianKitty.com over and over and over waiting for her to update and hopefully add my site. Then it happened. Around 5pm. I had no banners on the site. Just images and a webcounter. I just watched that webcounter explode. 100 views. 500. 1000. 2000. It just kept going up. Both of us sat there watching and reloading that webcounter. It was great. I let it go for the weekend and started thinking about how I could make money from this.
The following Monday morning I received a call at 8am. It was my university. They called to inform me that I was banned from ever using the school servers again. Over the weekend I had used 99.6% of the bandwidth the school had ever used. 750,000 requests. At that moment. On that call. I knew my life had changed forever.
Thank You Beth. May you Rest in Peace. I'm glad I got to meet you a few years after that. You were lovely and amazing.
Here is my PK story
In the fall of 1998, I was in university and we were given internet access. It was on a slow dial-up and it was a text-based browser. One of the first things I searched up was sex or porn. The first search result was PersianKitty.com. Back then when you used a text-based browser you would see the text of a website. There were no images. Instead, images would show up as a downloadable IMAGE link. It would take 30 minutes to download an image only to find out I had downloaded a banner lol. It was so frustrating. That said I surfed to the bottom of her site and saw her text webcounter which read 2,100,000 Visitors to date. I vividly remember that number. 2,100,000 Visitors. I was blown away and intrigued.
From there I stopped looking for porn. Instead, I turned my attention to starting my own website. First, I discovered out what a browser was and I did away with the text-based surfing. I learned how to code html or I should say I learned how to download someone else's code and edit it to make it look like mine. So I downloaded PK's html. Changed the logo. Uploaded the site to my university account (concordia.ca/~shap) and sought out link trades. The first person I found was Ynot Rick. We swapped links. Within a day PK's lawyer sent me a cease and desist. I couldn't believe it. She had seen my site AND she had enough money for a lawyer. This internet thing was going to be huge!
From there I removed my site and decided to start over and do things right. So I watched and learned how PK listed sites and decided to build my own. It was a cold snowy Friday in November. I had a buddy over who wanted to go toss a football around. Instead, he ended up watching as I reloaded PersianKitty.com over and over and over waiting for her to update and hopefully add my site. Then it happened. Around 5pm. I had no banners on the site. Just images and a webcounter. I just watched that webcounter explode. 100 views. 500. 1000. 2000. It just kept going up. Both of us sat there watching and reloading that webcounter. It was great. I let it go for the weekend and started thinking about how I could make money from this.
The following Monday morning I received a call at 8am. It was my university. They called to inform me that I was banned from ever using the school servers again. Over the weekend I had used 99.6% of the bandwidth the school had ever used. 750,000 requests. At that moment. On that call. I knew my life had changed forever.
Thank You Beth. May you Rest in Peace. I'm glad I got to meet you a few years after that. You were lovely and amazing.
. . . Thank you, PK.
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