It started in January 1998 on a total whim. I didn't want to write another book. I wanted to do something fun on the Web to relax.

where everything is transparent, so you can see how stuff works. Robots or multimedia displays would show you how it works.

It took six months to write. It's not a hugely popular article on the site, but it was the most fascinating thing I've ever studied. It's amazing how intricate we are -- I learned so much.

That's when I got enough volume that people would add to the articles. Experts would write in with more information, corrections, new topic ideas ... stuff like that.

I started with zero visitors a day, and did about an article a week. Once I got up to 20 the site started to get into search engines,

We started this on a whim four years ago. We don't want to make it any larger than it is. It really is a lot of fun.