I had a deja vu moment the other day, when I learned that Hurricane Bertha was forming in the Atlantic. Bertha, Bertha, Bertha ... oh, yeah.

Twelve years ago this Tuesday was my first day at The N&O.

It was also right after the 1996 version of Bertha slammed into the North Carolina coast.

I asked someone this week, "Don't they retire the names of hurricanes?" To which I was told, "Only the big ones." So there won't be another Katrina, or, for that matter, Fran, which hit less than two months after I came here from Maryland.

What I remember of the summer of 1996 is that it was very humid and the world was very different. Here's one example: I was the business editor, and we were just starting to write about what we called the "World Wide Web."

I used to ask our reporters to explain in their stories what the "Web" was. We called it "the colorful and graphically rich part of the Internet." I recall that the guy who covered tech for us, Steve Eisenstadt, used to complain to me that it was incredibly unhip in the Research Triangle, for goodness sakes, to have to do that.

But this was back in the days when only one in five Americans used the Internet, and they were doing it with that newfangled Netscape browser and maybe America Online. And they did so when there wasn't that much to see, and we used dial-up modems that crawled at 28,000 bits per second. Forget about being able to watch multimedia. We could barely watch media.

These days, according to our most recent numbers from Scarborough Research -- which does our marketing surveys -- 78 percent of Triangle adults say they have access to the Internet.

Which brings us to why, Friday a week ago, when the first bulletin moved over the wires about Jesse Helms' death, our first thoughts in the holiday-depleted newsroom were about getting as much content onto newsobserver.com as quickly as we could. That's because the audience was online, a Web audience that was orders of magnitude smaller a dozen years ago, when we would have been thinking only about the next morning's paper. And, since Helms' death was announced in the late morning, we would have had lots and lots of time to think about it. That luxury of time didn't exist July 4th.

The rise of the Internet between Berthas has been a double-edged sword. It has given us an immediate outlet for our stories and photos. No longer do we have to wait until the press rolls to share what we know. But it requires us to think and move much faster, and more visually.

When I looked at our Helms coverage over the past week, I see lots of stuff online -- photo galleries, videos, a dozen of Dwane Powell's cartoons -- that wouldn't have been there in 1996 or even later.

A couple of days ago, I reminisced about the '90s with transportation reporter Bruce Siceloff, who was the editor of our online Web site back then. Pack rat that he is, he pulled out a memo (I would like to say it was on parchment, but no, it wasn't) from 1998, which said that the traffic on the site for an entire week totaled 720,000.

As I wrote this column Thursday, I peeked at the traffic for just this past Wednesday, when nothing particularly momentous was happening: 538,000 page views, one day.

Top online stories

Here are the five most-read stories on newsobserver.com from the past week:

* He quit rather than lower flag for Helms

* N&O subscriber sues the paper for cutting staff

* Ex-diplomat: Sex with teens OK in foreign cultures

* Tiger's niece carving niche

* Two men drown in Neuse River

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.