Hi everyone,

I am in the Chicago area this week, and after my presentation this afternoon in Arlington Heights, I will be headed Downtown for a few days of meetings.
It was this week in 1995 that RIN (REALTORS Information Network) had its first "Charter Member" meeting at the Drake Hotel. I had the opportunity to
be the presenter at what Ed Evans (then president of RIN) called the "Big Tent" event.

As a speaker in the real estate industry, this was to me the biggest of events and visibility and I was very excited. Just 2 years before I was a
local board president and now I was speaking to most of the MLS and Association Executives in the country!

Walt Baczkowski, my AE from San Diego was there and we went running along Lake Michigan...as the ice moved along the surface of the Lake and deposited
itself with crashing thunder on the sea wall.

12 years later...back in Chicago. In 1995 the advanced hardware was a 486 with 4 to 8 MB of RAM. The www was very new and the total number of real
estate web sites was less than 300, which was a shockingly high number to most of us back then. It has been a long run, and we are not through yet as
we enter upon the age of collaboration and what is being referred to as Web 2.0.