The Day I Was Internet Famous: Bill’s Net World and the Rise of Online Medicine
Before TikTok, Google, or even WebMD… there was Bill’s Net World. Back in the mid-1990s, while still in med school, I built one of the first web directories for physicians — and it caught the attention of the Medical Tribune and the Boston Globe. Here’s how it happened.
Let me tell you a little story. It’s one of those “toot my own horn” tales, but it’s a piece of personal and internet history that’s too good not to share.
I’m old enough to remember the world before the internet. I’ll be 62 this year, and I’ve lived through the rise of personal computers, floppy disks, bulletin boards, and the early days of the World Wide Web.
I started preparing for medical school around 1989 and got accepted in 1991. A good friend of mine, Amish Patel—now a surgeon in Oklahoma—was also chasing the med school dream. He had a computer. I didn’t. His ran off 5¼” floppy disks and printed on a dot matrix printer, but it could run word processors and games. I was hooked.
Eventually, I bought my own: a 386 double-clock processor with maybe a 200 MB hard drive (if that). I upgraded it relentlessly—9600 baud modem, then 14.4k, and eventually a blazing-fast 56k. I connected to local BBSs, learned Telnet and FTP, and eventually stumbled into the wild world of the internet. This thing called the World Wide Web was exploding, and I wanted in.
🔗 Enter: Bill’s Net World
So, I learned some basic HTML and built my own website. I was in med school at the time, and my focus was entirely on medicine. I thought: Why not build a centralized medical resource hub? So I did. I gathered links to medical journals, university pages, gopher servers at the NIH, and every useful tool I could find. It wasn’t flashy—it was functional.
I called it Bill’s Net World.
I didn’t promote it. I didn’t advertise it. I just put it online and forgot about it.
Until one day in April 1996, I was flipping through a medical publication I subscribed to called Medical Tribune. They had a quarterly supplement called Med Trib Web—a guide to online resources for physicians. I’m flipping through the “M.D. Cyberguide” section, and my jaw drops.
“Bill BeBout has created an impressive Web page with links to other pages that deal with just about every medical topic out there…”
I nearly fell out of my chair.
🌐 A Four-Cross Review
Not only had they reviewed my website, they gave it the highest possible rating—four crosses. For comparison? The AMA homepage got three crosses. The American Heart Association got two. The FDA homepage only got three. But little ol’ me, building a site out of a home office with no team, just a passion for medicine and a modem—I got four.
“If you can’t find what you want here, Bill has linked all the major search tools to his page as well. This is definitely one to check out.”
And they weren’t the only ones who noticed. Sometime later, The Boston Globe picked up the story and wrote a piece featuring my site, based on the Med Tribune review. I’ve been trying to track down that original newspaper clipping ever since. If anyone out there has access to the Boston Globe archives from around 1996—let me know.
🚖 From Kentucky to Keynotes
That little website changed my life.
I was flown out to speak at a symposium in Phoenix, Arizona. When I arrived at the airport, a guy was holding a sign that read:
“Dr. William Bebout.”
They picked me up in a limo. I was just a country boy from Kentucky—I’d never even seen a limo in person, let alone ridden in one.
That experience—building something, sharing knowledge, getting recognized for it—never left me. And here I am again, almost 30 years later, still building websites, now curating Dr. Bebout’s Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, still chasing that love for connecting people with history, knowledge, and the weirdness of medicine.
🧠 Lesson?
Find something that lights you up—and don’t let it go.
You never know who might be watching.
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