DigitalThink Online Courses

2026 preface. I wrote and taught these for DigitalThink between 1997 and 1999, when “corporate e-learning” was a brand-new category and most of the audience was reaching the material over a dial-up modem. The technology was ambitious for the bandwidth. Each course ran as a sequence of lessons stitched together with audio clips, animated “flipbooks,” clickable “smartmaps,” and small interactive applets for the hands-on parts. The Advanced JavaBeans course alone had nine modules, fifty-nine lessons, eighteen exercises, eleven audio clips, nine flipbooks, seven smartmaps, and three ordering applets — a lot of moving parts to push down a 56k line.

The part that aged strangely is the pitch. Learn a real engineering skill, at your own pace, from an instructor you never meet, with interactive practice built in: that’s almost word for word the pitch for the AI tutors that turned up twenty-five years later, except the tutor answers back now. The course players are long dead, and the applet plugin that ran the exercises was pulled from browsers between 2015 and 2017. What held up was the idea, not the delivery.