Back in 1994 my friend Brian and I were exploring ideas on how to make a profit off this brand new concept called the world wide web. At this point in time the web was simply a set of computer servers that were already in place as FTP servers, email, and other messaging/data transfer protocols. I worked for Lotus at the time and I knew the developers of SmartText which used SGML. This was a great tool for publishing books and text in a very nice graphical form. Then one day Netscape was invented and that browser changed everything. We wanted to create our own little world and started brain storming some ideas.

We started with electric city and at night time we would change the graphic to night time.

But that name was too long so we tried ecity.com and not long after that cybercity.com.

As a joke I created Hell city

We ended up registering (for free in those days) ecity.com, icity.com, wcity.com, ccity.com, cybercity.com, cyberhut.com, xcity.com, and electriccity.com. We liked the idea of X as being alternative at the time (it was the 90's). Radio stations were marking their call letters ending in X. The X generation was always in the news. The X-files was a huge hit on TV. It seemed fitting to settle on X City. Just as we decided on XCity.com, we added a couple more people (Eric and Alice) to the mix and created Interworks.net. We spent all that time on a name that we ended up throwing out the window with a snap of a finger. Interworks did custom programming in Cold Fusion, Macro Media, Perl, SQL Server, as well as Java. But this didn't last too long as we all had full time jobs else where.

I let all other domains go but retained xcity.com. Brian took playmaker.com, gizmo.com, and interworks.net. Eric took acme-atlanta.com and Alice played in a band and disapeared. I turned xcity.com into my own little consulting information page that later morphed into my own personal web site.