WELCOME TO STEPHEN.SYS ======================= You have booted into the 1998 wing of stephenlaphen.com. Everything here is period accurate, except the parts that are jokes. START HERE: 1. Click STEPHEN ONLINE on the desktop and press SIGN ON. 2. Once you hear "Welcome", pick a year from the main menu. Each one opens my home page from that year in Netscape. 3. You have mail. Probably. WHAT WORKS: STEPHEN ONLINE ... sign on. The dial-up is real. The phone number is real-ish. NETSCAPE ....... once you are online, browse the year archives. One homepage per year. ADFORGE v1.2 ... forge yourself a genuine advertisement for five cents. MY COMPUTER .... poke around C:\ if you must. RUMORS (UNCONFIRMED): * There is a VAULT on this machine. The webmaster could never remember passwords, so he published them on his old homepages. Typical. * The BBS never went offline. If you can find the dial-in number, you can still connect. * DOS veterans know what happens when you format C:. - The Management

C:\VAULT\FAILURES.LOG ===================== ACCESS GRANTED. Congratulations, snoop. Two companies died under my marketing. Here is what the vault remembers: PRODUCE MATE (d. 2021) The mat kind of worked. Sometimes. The lesson: marketing can amplify a good product but it cannot resuscitate an inconsistent one. Also, being "too ethical to mention the antimicrobial mat during a pandemic" is a decision I still think about. CASTLE / INHABIT (d. seven weeks in) Built a whole department. Hired three people. Renamed the company in two weeks flat because of a trademark. We were three weeks from press coverage when the money ran out. The machine worked. The company did not. MORAL: strong execution cannot cure weak capitalization. But it makes a great story. [ more classified material to be declassified as the webmaster writes it ]