Once upon a time there was a technology, popular nationwide, that everyone in Santa Barbara used to get their dining information. This proven information delivery system was called “the phone book.” In the summer of 1994 a new website named SantaBarbara.com went to battle with the restaurant section of the yellow pages and a nickname was born.

The University of California, Santa Barbara, was chosen as one of the first four “nodes” of a new computer network, called ARPANET, along with UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Utah. This network went live on October 29, 1969 and was eventually renamed the “Internet.” The very first email was sent by engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971 and the Web was originally conceived in 1989 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee. In 1993 the first widely-available web browser, called Mosaic, was released by two programmers, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the University of Illinois in Urbana–Champaign. At about this time a local software engineer, who now writes this column, started tinkering around with this new world-wide wonder.

Creating a website to showcase Santa Barbara seemed like the most fun way to learn how this new medium worked. There was no money to be made on the Web at the time and there was no Google. To start the project, I went out and bought one of the first consumer digital cameras that had no screen and had a capacity of just 48 pictures. As primitive as it was it was, it saved a huge amount of time over the alternative, which was to use film, develop it, and scan the negatives into a computer.

About six months later, I had finished taking hundreds of digital photos of, and writing about, our beaches, parks, activities, and tourist attractions. Creating an online restaurant guide was put off for last because I didn’t want to just list names and phone numbers. That wouldn’t be any better than the phone book and people expected everything on the Web to be very visual. So, I personally visited every single restaurant in Santa Barbara and took photos inside and out. The first two photos I took were of Moby Dick and Santa Barbara Shellfish Company. It turned out to be a much bigger project than expected because, while walking to known addresses on my itinerary, I quickly discovered that there were dozens of restaurants in our town that were not listed in the yellow pages.

At this point in time, the summer of 1994, Google was still four years away from launching and the best option to find things online was the Yahoo website directory. But Yahoo didn’t yet have a section for Santa Barbara. So, I figured the only chance of getting any visitors to my new site was to acquire SantaBarbara.com and hope that people were typing that domain name into their web browser address bar to find information about the South Coast.

As it turns out, about 1,000 people per day were testing my new domain and traffic to the fledgling site grew quickly as word about it spread. It was immediately obvious that the dining guide was the star of the show because people started emailing me tips about restaurant openings, closings, and eateries that were coming soon. For some reason, readers also emailed me reviews of their dining experiences so my very next project was to create an online restaurant review system which debuted a few months later, about ten years before Yelp arrived.

The restaurant review system was a big hit but it came with a personal cost. I had to spend time every single day playing restaurant referee. I had to weed-out fake good reviews, fake bad reviews, over-the-top bad reviews, and respond to restaurant owners who sent me flame mail when something negative was written about their dining establishment.

A side effect of running a local restaurant guide is that you are first in line to a lot of local food news, so I started a blog to share it with others. The new blog was positively received and eventually this software engineer had the honor of being asked by the Santa Barbara Independent to share his musings with their large base of readers. Finding a name for the blog and column wasn’t too difficult. Because I ran SantaBarbara.com anonymously, every time someone mentioned yours truly online, they always referred to me as “the restaurant guy.”

TIME CAPSULE: These 1994 photos of Moby Dick and Santa Barbara Shellfish Company were possibly the first digital pictures ever taken of restaurants in Santa Barbara. Unfortunately the restaurants burned down 4 years later but were rebuilt. The original photos, which I don’t have anymore, were actually much higher resolution than this but dial-up Internet back then was too slow to use them, so all photos had to be down-scaled.