What actually happened... Dr. Stoffer asked Judy Sermeno for permission to copy her notes to CHEM 381 and a secretary to the department typed them up into the document that has been distributed ever since.

Meanwhile, while this was happening, I was an undergraduate at NMSU who was running around with Pete, another chemistry undergraduate who was planning on going into chemistry education, and we came up with this idea of using computers to build documents that summarized things and included pointers to references. We did an independent project class our senior year at Northeast Missouri State building a prototype of such a document covering the math needed for chemistry.

I don't expect anyone to understand what happened that year. It was awesome. I enjoyed my last semester, and I didn't have the slightest hint of "senioritous." I learned a lot, and it was education at its best. It was Innesfree.


When I found out about the web, the ideas just fell into place. Until today (9-20-95) all I had to go on was the rumor that there had been this girl who typed up the notes, and the rumor said she was Chinese. The rumor below isn't true. I'd like to think it could have happened, though.

The Myth of MING X

I have this picture of her in my mind. this "Ming X", this who girl spent hour after hour with this little manual typewriter, preparing notes for CHEM381 because she's obsessed with an ideal.

It's 1:30 AM in the morning, and the next time she looks at the clock it's going to read 3:15 AM. She was tired hours ago, but for Ming there is something beautiful, something perfect, about what she is doing. She doesn't know that ten years or so will go by, and then her document is going to be transcribed to something called the World Wide Web, that her idea is going to grow into something else.