Writing is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

The time certainly has flown since December 1995, when Wired Windows first graced the pages of Network World. If Mencken is correct, it's high time I escaped before the madness overtakes me.

After 10 years and more than 400 columns, Wired Windows will be no more.

We've come a long way in that time. All three columns in December 1995 dealt with the various ways to connect your new Windows 95 desktops to the various NetWare servers (2.x, 3.x and the brand-new 4.0) on your network. NetWare 3.x was the dominant server operating system, and DOS (sometimes in combination with Windows 3.1) was still dominant on the desktop, but "cutting-edge" users clamored for OS/2. We were still questioning whether Token-Ring, FDDI or, possibly, ATM would replace Ethernet as the protocol for connecting the desktop to the network.

That same month Bill Gates "discovered" the Internet and the World Wide Web - which had, in fact, been doing quite well without his attention. Redmond's nascent Microsoft Network (now MSN) was more worried by AOL and CompuServe than the Internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub (which later morphed into Google), but Internet search was in its infancy, dominated by the directories at Yahoo and AltaVista.

Identity services, now considered the platform needed for service-oriented computing, hadn't yet been named. There were directory services (dominated by Novell's NDS, the Netscape directory and x.500) but the first "killer app," electronic provisioning, wouldn't show up for three years.

But now it's time to move on. My bags are packed, and I'm ready to go. Still, I don't think the madness has completely overtaken me just yet. So any who wish to watch my progress along that path can still follow in my Network World newsletters: "Identity Management", "Novell NetWare Tips" and the newly renamed "Windows Networking Strategies".

Before I go, though, I'd like to thank editors in chief John Gallant (who took a chance 10 years ago) and John Dix, as well as the folks who have edited Wired Windows - Doug Barney, Paul Desmond, Paul McNamara, Bob Brown and my current editor, Michael Cooney - for their support and effort. But most of all, thanks to you, the readers. Without you I really would have gone mad!