There were a thousand versions over the years, made with different tools, as the technology evolved.
It’s first version was 500 kb and I hand coded it with html.
The year was perhaps 1995, I kept no archive, and don’t remember the year.
It was the first step in personal publishing with the online world.
We have evolved galaxies since those pioneering times, we know much more of the world.
We also know much more about ourselves.
We do.

A Name.
What ‘s in a name?
Names are arrangements of letters.
Letters by themselves have no particular meaning, but in certain arrangements, they can acquire meaning.
They also possess a sound of their own, particular to each person.
Some names carry a long history with them, others are much more common and eventless.
The decision to change a name is not a light hearted one, it has tangible consequences, but avoiding the change can also cause problems further along the road.
When you know the destination, you must choose the road you take with care and consideration.
That’s what i did, and i don’t regret the time i took to choose the road and the destination

Previous versions of my website were built under the nickname I chose more than twenty years ago to represent my identity on the world wide web.
In those days you had to choose a nickname to use some services, namely the IRC service, that everybody used.
I chose an instrument of both alchemy and chemistry, the retort.
A retort is a device used to purify substances, to separate the core from its impurities, to reach for the gold within.
It was a fine and meaningful name, it represented me for all these years, but it was a sort of a disguise, a smoke screen to the person behind it, and so it was time to clear the fog and present myself with my birth name.
The retorta.net of the past was archived, and a brand new mariopires.pt is here.