User:West43rd

west43rd is the online handle for Bob Knorpp, who is a podcaster based in Greensboro, NC.

The name "west43rd" harkens back to the early days of the Web. In 1994, Bob first started getting interested in the Internet. He was attending a SIGGRAPH conference in August of that year in Orlando, FL, and entered into several conversations with individuals who were dialing in for USENET, IRC and eMail. He was so enamored that upon returning home to Richmond, VA (his home city at the time) he immediately started seeking out a way to connect.

Not willing to settle for the gated world of AOL at the time, he did some research and discovered The Pipeline service in New York City. And not wanting to seem an outsider, he chose his street name at the time (West 43rd Street) in order to seem part of the community, even though he was paying $90 a month to dial in long-distance to the service.

(As a side note, The Pipeline was the brainchild of James Gleick and Uday Ivatury and was the first service to embrace an AOL-style GUI to display Internet content. As Netscape Navigator came on the scene they attempted to also incorporate a Web browser, but eventually were overtaken by the pace of development and sold out to PSINet. Some good reading if you're interested.)

To this day Bob continues to maintain the west43rd@pipeline.com email address. (It's a dead domain owned by Earthlink and only a handful of people still have these addresses.) And as a point of trivia for your Pipeliners out there, he also maintains generic@pipeline.com, which was Uday's technical support address.

Bob is a marketing consultant by day, working with a range of clients to enhance their advertising and marketing efforts. He's dedicated to sharing this information on his show, The BeanCast and on his blog.