Foreword: The birth and growth of owenmed.com
During the mid-1990s, when popular use of the World Wide Web was just beginning to take off, I decided that I wanted to build my own medical practice website. My goals for the site were not only to let prospective patients know about our practice and the services we offered. I also wanted to provide site visitors with a bit of history about my own personal contributions to LGBT healthcare in the early years of the movement for gay rights post-Stonewall. Additionally, I thought that it would be important to remind site visitors about the challenges my patients and I faced during the early years of the AIDS epidemic as so many of our friends, colleagues, and patients started to come down with mysterious symptoms and signs we would later come to know as HIV/AIDS.
So, over Labor Day weekend in September 1997, without any prior knowledge of programming, web design or HTML coding, I installed and read the manual cover-to-cover of an early website creation program called Microsoft FrontPage. Domain names were still plentiful in those days although, for sole proprietors, they were limited to these three domain endings: .com, .net, and .org. I was fortunate in being able to secure the easy-to-remember "owenmed.com" domain name that very same weekend.
By the evening of Labor Day Monday in 1997, I had created and published my practice's first rudimentary website, www.owenmed.com, and had provided @owenmed.com email addresses to each of my employees. Over the years, I built upon our practice website until I closed my private practice at the end of 2014 and joined Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation.
In this section I have reproduced, for historical interest, excerpts from the final edition of our legacy owenmed.com site. I hope you enjoy this leap down Memory Lane as much as I enjoyed originally creating the website and reviewing it again during the genesis of this new owenmed.com!
Special Thanks
Last but not least, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank my staff, particularly my Senior Medical Assistant of 33½ years, Eliana Hernández, CMA; my physician assistant of 22¼ years, Carl Stein, MHS, PA-C; my colleagues throughout the world, the United States, and in San Francisco at California Pacific Medical Center Valencia-Mission and Castro Campuses; my friends, particularly my closest buddy since high school, Stan Yantis, MD; my family, particularly my sister, Deborah Owen, MD; and most of all -- my warm, engaging, intelligent, challenging, and courageous patients, without whose steadfast support this part of my life's journey would not have been possible.
Abraços a todos! -- Hugs to everyone!
Bill Owen, MD
During the mid-1990s, when popular use of the World Wide Web was just beginning to take off, I decided that I wanted to build my own medical practice website. My goals for the site were not only to let prospective patients know about our practice and the services we offered. I also wanted to provide site visitors with a bit of history about my own personal contributions to LGBT healthcare in the early years of the movement for gay rights post-Stonewall. Additionally, I thought that it would be important to remind site visitors about the challenges my patients and I faced during the early years of the AIDS epidemic as so many of our friends, colleagues, and patients started to come down with mysterious symptoms and signs we would later come to know as HIV/AIDS.
So, over Labor Day weekend in September 1997, without any prior knowledge of programming, web design or HTML coding, I installed and read the manual cover-to-cover of an early website creation program called Microsoft FrontPage. Domain names were still plentiful in those days although, for sole proprietors, they were limited to these three domain endings: .com, .net, and .org. I was fortunate in being able to secure the easy-to-remember "owenmed.com" domain name that very same weekend.
By the evening of Labor Day Monday in 1997, I had created and published my practice's first rudimentary website, www.owenmed.com, and had provided @owenmed.com email addresses to each of my employees. Over the years, I built upon our practice website until I closed my private practice at the end of 2014 and joined Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation.
In this section I have reproduced, for historical interest, excerpts from the final edition of our legacy owenmed.com site. I hope you enjoy this leap down Memory Lane as much as I enjoyed originally creating the website and reviewing it again during the genesis of this new owenmed.com!
Special Thanks
Last but not least, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank my staff, particularly my Senior Medical Assistant of 33½ years, Eliana Hernández, CMA; my physician assistant of 22¼ years, Carl Stein, MHS, PA-C; my colleagues throughout the world, the United States, and in San Francisco at California Pacific Medical Center Valencia-Mission and Castro Campuses; my friends, particularly my closest buddy since high school, Stan Yantis, MD; my family, particularly my sister, Deborah Owen, MD; and most of all -- my warm, engaging, intelligent, challenging, and courageous patients, without whose steadfast support this part of my life's journey would not have been possible.
Abraços a todos! -- Hugs to everyone!
Bill Owen, MD
