GOOGLE GETS GOING: A Personal Perspective

[RonPrice]

In September 1998, as I was getting ready to finish my last two terms as a full-time teacher in Western Australia,Google set up workspace in a garage in Menlo Park California. Google filed for incorporation that same month. A bank account for this newly-established company was opened by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with a cheque for $100,000. These two young computer science grad students at Stanford university had first met in 1995 and in 1997 they gave the name Google to their program and partnership. They hired Craig Silverstein in 1998 as their first employee; he was a fellow student.


In September 1998 I had six more months of teaching as a full-time lecturer and, by the time I had retired and was set-up in my sea-change town in Tasmania, Google was off and running in a big way. Now, ten years later in 2008, I draw on Google for my home library and I have posted millions of my words on the internet.-Ron Price, Pioneering over Four Epochs, 25 September 2008.


By 2004 you had 800 employees
a campus environment and an
index of eight billion web pages.
I had written three books, posted
millions of words at thousands of
sites and become famous in worlds
of nanoseconds, pixels and kilobytes:
no famous person me--I would never
be a celebrity, a person of renown, but
remain unobtrusive, obscure, far, far
from the bright lights of great renown.

David Halberstam, American Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and author
said that a writer should be like a
playwright putting people on stage,
putting ideas on stage, making the
reader become the audience.1 We live
live our lives through celebrities, said
he and some, like me, live through the
world of Google and other worlds, David:
indeed it is a very complex process just
how we all live, each and all of us, David.

1 American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist(1964) and tireless author of 20 books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Centre and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed in a car crash south of San Francisco in April 2007. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan. Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s and into the periphery of my life, when I was coming into my own as a Baha’i pioneer for the Canadian Bahá’í community. Halberstam was covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times and I was struggling with my nascent academic career, my nascent animal impulses and my nascent religio-philosophical convictions. -Ron Price with thanks to Clyde Haberman, "David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies," 24 April, 2007, New York Times.


Ron Price
25 September 2008