Before the internet was opened to the public and before ".com" existed, almost no one knew whether — or how — the emerging network could serve teaching, research, and administration. I spent those years finding out: building one of the first educational gopher services, writing and speaking about how educators could actually use the internet, and translating a brand-new, highly technical capability for a non-technical national audience. That public body of work is what made me a known quantity in the earliest days of the web — and it's what led, in 1997, to Nike hiring me as its first webmaster.
At the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory I built and ran an Internet Gopher service that put educational research at educators' fingertips years before the graphical web made that ordinary. It offered searchable databases of Northwest educational projects and practices, NWREL's publications and newsletters, and regional conference listings — and it wired NWREL into the wider network: the other regional gophers across the five-state region, the ten regional educational laboratories nationally, and national services from the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) and the ERIC clearinghouses.
"With a few strokes of your computer keyboard, access to educational materials can be, literally, at your fingertips through NWREL's Internet Gopher. … Welcome to 'Gopherspace.'"
— from my NWREL publication, Educational Materials At Your Fingertips
Building the service was only half the work; the other half was making it legible to people who had never heard the word "gopher." I wrote and published materials explaining the internet's availability and application for educators, parents, and policymakers — turning an unproven, jargon-heavy technology into something a classroom teacher could picture and use. This translate-for-non-experts instinct — adopt the new thing first, then teach everyone else to use it — became the throughline of my entire career, and it's exactly what AI enablement asks for today.
NWREL publication introducing the Internet Gopher to a non-technical education audience.
Written work on the internet's availability and application for educators across the region.
I moderated the "K-12 and the Internet" panel at a FARNET conference — credited as Kristin Boden-MacKay, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory — on a program alongside people who were literally building the internet, including Mark McCahill, creator of the Gopher protocol, Clifford Neuman (USC/ISI), and Tom Longstaff (CERT / Carnegie Mellon). It is documented in the official Internet Monthly Report, November 1994 — a verifiable, primary-source record of my presence, at the internet's inception, among the people defining it.
Recognized with a Certificate of Appreciation for presenting at the Oregon Careers Conference (Feb 17–18, 1995) — an early example of carrying this new capability to practitioners in the field.
None of the evangelism was hand-waving — I ran the systems underneath it. In 1995 I completed formal Unix System Administration (Compatible Computers, Inc., April 25, 1995) and Solaris System Administration training, administering the servers and networks that made the gopher service and early web work. Real technical depth beneath the public-facing translation is a pattern that repeats straight through to architecting nike.com.
By 1997, "person who has actually built internet services and can explain them to anyone" was a rare profile — and it was exactly the profile Nike needed to move a wholesale giant onto the web. The origin story and the nike.com story are one continuous line. See what came next →
Verified & documentary record: Internet Monthly Report, November 1994 (FARNET "K-12 and the Internet" panel, credited as Kristin Boden-MacKay, NWREL). Supporting artifacts — the Educational Materials At Your Fingertips publication, NWREL early-internet articles, the Oregon Careers Conference certificate, and the 1995 Unix/Solaris System Administration certifications — available on request.