On February 27^th of 1996 ... undaunted by the task of launching a new Graphic Design freelance business, the ambitious entrepreneur (T. Harris) stepped through the doors of her local town hall to acquire GA's official public status as an actual business operation.

It was so much easier than she had ever anticipated.

Who was Graphics Applied? What were the business "intentions"? How many were under current employment? Where did the business reside?

The amazingly, uninterested response though, was a blatant: "That'll be FIVE dollars please!"

The time has come to clean up that tray of pencils and markers, and of trashing those sheets of Letraset type. The ink bottles have long since dried and the exacto blades have rusted into their long metallic sleeves.

Tools of the trade have become the mouse, the "tablet" and the twenty-one-inch monitor. No longer are mats cut and picture frames sawn from strips of lattice. It is the high-speed modem connection and a program called WS-FTP, by which we hang our art; only to be viewed via the version 4 "O" browser (minimum) window and an HTML frameset.

It's Adobe and Quark, Freehand and Illustrator, Macromedia and Jasc, IE and NN. It's pixels and points, resolution and bits, 16 color UNIX help graphics and 256 color [sheds] for a Windows NT OS. It's image maps and rollovers, Flash and Gifs. ... Can't forget Jpegs and Tifs, PCXs and BMPs. Webworks and GoLive and HotMetal Pro. Microsoft FrontPage and ....

It's been a long time saving and a lot of jobs accomplished, but GA has finally profited enough to "put back in" to the company. It made many visits to on-line sites offering bundles and packages of this and that; FAST Chips, LOTS of RAM, Dual-processing, DVD, and so on. GA waddled through the smudge and finally decided: "It'll be a Gateway!" ... and so it came to pass ... A Gateway P-III 550, with all the bells and whistles.