Webjac has been my nickname for as long as I can remember (At least 19 years!) It’s a key part of my identity on the web.
The origin of this name is quite simple, but let me tell you the story.
It was 1995 and I was starting to mess around with computers (I was 12 – 13 at the time), back then the 386 was dead and the 486 was just coming out to the market and everyone talked about how 586 was going to be this great phenomenon: “the 32-bit computer”.
At home I had a 486 that we then changed to the first Pentium and that’s when Internet providers started showing up at Venezuela, I remember I had T-NET.
I remember making my first “internet 101 course” at the valencia Forum and that’s where I first visited Yahoo!, I learned to use Outlook Express 3.1 among other internet services.
Then I learned about ICQ and its famous “cooocooo”. Just a few of my friends had Internet access and the logged in to ICQ when those terrible 28.8 kbps fax-modems were a thing.
Back then and highly influenced by the movie “Hackers” (1995) it was necesary to have a “nickname”, an alter-ego for the net.
Names like Zero-cool, EDGE, Xtreme, Razor, Acid Burn, Crash Override, Phantom Freak, Cereal Killer, Blade were very common on a nascent internet that was just starting to grow on Venezuela at the time and that it was limited to techies and early adopters.
I was not to be left behind…
Webjac is the merge of 2 words: Web & JAC.
Web is very obvious: comes from the World Wide Web, nothing to explain there.
JAC is easy to figure out: Jaime Antonio Creixems, those are my initials. Some people think that it’s a mispell of Jack, but no, it’s just my initials.
I remember that for a few months I tried different things like Starjac, Megajac, Cyberjac, Netjac, Extremejac, etc.
And I do remember correctly Netjac was my first nickname but after a couple of months I changed it to Cyberjac. Then, when I created my first Hotmail account Cyberjac was taken so I decided to try Webjac, Which would we something like Jaime A. Creixems at the web = Webjac.
webjac@hotmail.com was the first thing with webjac as a nickname. The it was my ICQ, then Microsoft Messenger came out and that was when Webjac came to be the only alter-ego for me on the internet.
The next step for Webjac was when I built my first company back in 2004. For years I wanted to call it “Webjac Ink” as I saw it as the ink that would fill the web canvas. Years before even considering creating a company I already had the logo and art for it. When I finally created it I had 3 other partners, so it went from being Webjac Ink to be called “Web Ink” a name that the company still has today, even though I’m no longer a part of it.
In 2004 I was starting in web development, and when I went to buy webjac.com, it wasn’t available :(. Thankfully webjac.net was available and that became my blog for years.
My web design services though were at creixems.com.
On 2010 I got notice that webjac.com was going for auction and a company offer to buy it for me for $300. I decided to do my research. I went to the auction and bought it myself for just $15.
Finally, almost 15 years after coming up with webjac and using it for everything I finally owned webjac.com 😀
On 2014 I decided to merge my web design services (at creixems.com) with my blog and make a full site for myself at webjac.com.
So nowadays, if you want to know about me on the internet, you go to webjac.com: my writings, services, and everything related to me right where it belong.
I was lucky, or had good vision as a teenager for choosing webjac as a nickname. Terminology like cyber, net or mega are definitely off-fashion nowadays. But web still reamins at the epicenter of the new advances in tech.
We talk about web services, web solutions and the web is the communications layer ,for most of our daily activities. All that “net” and “cyber” definitely looks weird and way to nerdy now.
The Web is the platform over wich more and more services are based, because it’s open, because it’s mostly free, easy and simple, yet powerful enough to let us reach anyone in the world on any device.
It’s true tough, nowadays those “nicknames” are definitely a thing of the past, there aren’t many zero-cools or crash-overrides around, but I’ll keep webjac, maybe is just nostalgia, maybe it’s a statement saying I was one of the first around, but I remember that web where the zero-cools and crash-overrides of the time logged in to talk tech, logged in for no purpose at all, just because we were the ones that could.
People takes the web for granted today, they go do something: share pictures, read news, read email, talk to friends, listen to music, and so. Back in our days, we connected because we could do it, because it was our own space, we owned it, we were the ones that saw the potential, we were the ones that knew how.
Those days were the best.