> ColdFusion, CGI, ASPX ... it was not exactly a beautiful world back then.
Pffft. VRML is the whole game, baby! Once everyone runs out and gets an SGI oxygen, Nobody is going to use freaking web browsers ever again. I mean, HTML, what a joke.
Also, ASPX (so ASP.Net) was a vastly superior technology to PHP. It was my first love, and I ditched it for Ruby on Rails, but ASP.Net was really good. Especially when you ran it on Linux using Mono.
The previous post probably should have said classic ASP, not ASPX.
Classic ASP was the more direct competitor to PHP, while ASP.net came along later, as part of a next generation of web server languages/frameworks/platforms.
I remember VRML being a possible PhD topic for me in 1997, I think that was about the last I heard of it!
The other option I was actually offered was in machine learning and categorisation, but I avoid it as it was obviously a dead end lol.