It was something that I had already been interested in. In the months leading up to my wedding, in October of 1994, I began reading a new magazine called Wired. I was completely hooked: the idea that one could publish something akin to a magazine without encurring the the cost of printing was amazing to me. Right after my honeymoon, I picked up the first edition of Cue's "Using the Internet" and read its 700 pages from cover to cover.
Armed with a public-domain copy of NTSA Mosiac 1.1, I set about designing a page about the SIPC. When the call for help arrived in March, 1995 I was ready. I presented the work I had already done to Kathi Doak, who was then the Deputy Director of the Time Inc. Picture Collection. Being as far ahead of the curve as I was landed me in the position to assist Marthe Smith in creating the Picture Collection's website for Pathfinder.
The folks at Pathfinder were very hot to get us aboard. Our 20 million photos represented an unending source of content at a time when seeing a photograph on a computer screen was still a novelty. So Marthe & I set out designing a site that would showcase what was owned by Time Inc.: the material shot by the LIFE staff photographers from 1936 - 1972, photos from the Pix Inc collection purchased by the company, and various public domain sources such as US Army and NASA photographs.
We gathered what we could from the various sources and began to categorize galleries of the photos: Nature, Space, War, Entertainers, Sports. My contribution was an idea I had called Your Picks. In this section, people could email us with a request for a photo. On the page that the picture appeared, there was a trivia question related to the picture where a correct answer would get you a "bonus" photo. The first section had to be assembled from people I knew, so that I could build the page. So the first selections came from two people in my wedding party, Dave Kaplan and Barbara Cantone; a coworker, Andrew Owens; and my mother, Barbara Daly. It was a good idea which became all too time-consuming.
About a year and a half later, when I was offered the job at CNN/SI, my participation in Photo Sight had dwindled to almost no time at all. I had been promoted to supervisor at the SIPC and had been working hard on their new database for cataloguing photographs. But the sites that I helped to build are still online: in the now-defunct Pathfinder they stand as a (very) low-tech tribute to the early days of Internet content.