I started learning HTML in 1995 and first wrote it professionally in 1997. (I was sixteen and got to design a mid-size software company's intranet on my first summer job in the business. It was easy to get into the industry then with any modest web skills.)
This article is missing two important ways to learn HTML back in the day:
1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS. Everything was right there in one file. If you saw a site you liked, just take a copy of the source and tweak it locally to understand how it works.
2) GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.
Look at the source. It's easy to understand the basics of HTML just by comparing the source and output. Deeply nested divs and tables were not a thing yet.
Reading the OP I was pretty sure the author wasn't building websites in 1997.
Not mentioning the GUI tools was a pretty poor omission: Frontpage was everywhere back then. I personally hand-coded but had to use it in my first professional role in '98.
Even the books were wrong. I had (it might still be in a box at my parents) a 1st Ed. copy of HTML: The Definitive Guide, later followed by other O'Reilly books: CSS Def. Guide and one I wore to death as it was the MDN of the day: the DHTML Def. Guide.
That site is awesome; I had to look and yep, allcaps!
> 1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS.
Yes, but also in the following years, js and css were simple too. I learned js and css (well html as well I guess, but that took like... a day) initally by reading website source, before minification and obfuscation, webpack, SASS, etc.
It's a beautiful thing to use a web application where all the internals are visible and tweakable. These days I try to develop with as little obfuscation as possible, but it sure is going against the grain. See https://dev.to/open-wc/developing-without-a-build-1-introduc... and Snowpack.
Came here to say that. Most people in my circle were starting like that, playing around in Netscape, finding Composer and be like: Wow, I can make web pages myself.
Soon the even bigger revelation came: It's all just plain text!
Also: I don't remember anyone using books. The web was much smaller back than, but if it has had anything in abundance it was resources for learning how to make websites.
That's why I included right-click-protection scripts on all my pages! Couldn't have my friends steal my cool gifs (that I'd shamelessly stolen somewhere else) or copy my cool menu hover effect or whatever!
Of course all this was futile, but we weren't knowledgeable enough to know better, heh. At some point, I also had a script that would "encrypt" my HTML. Looking back, it was just base64 encoding the source, and then through JS converting that string to html and inserting into the body dom element.
Almost 30 years have passed and this website still works and renders perfectly in modern browsers! Will we be able to say the same about current websites 20 years from now?
The first websites I remember - this would have been around '93 I think - were the Smithsonian one that showed gemstones, and the original IMDB that was still then hosted at the University of Cardiff in Wales.
Isn't it funny how these early sites managed to be completely functional and useful in their plain and unpretentious way without pulling down gigabytes of cruft designed primarily to make it look like you aren't looking at a website. Given the choice between the 2022 and 1993 presentations of IMDB, I'd take the earlier one in a heartbeat.
As an counter example - Last year I dug up my old PC from around 2000, which had not been booted up since 2006 or so. I think I had 512 megs of ram on than one.
Fired up opera, which still had cached websites in the tabs - most of them long gone. Funny to see 2006-era Facebook in the flesh.
Tried to fire up a some news websites, and ended up with BSOD rather quickly. Chewed right through the paltry memory.
edit: I guess it is possible to browse some modern websites by disabling javascript, media downloads, and what not. But it's probably going to be a limited experience as far as functionality goes.
Yes they did! But if you were learning - you could drag and drop and then see what tags were created. And when you realized that what it was creating was awful, that meant that you finally understood HTML!
> GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.
This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.
Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.
It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!
I also taught myself HTML around 95 or 96. I think I even used one of the books the OP mentioned and used Notepad to write my source.
I knew one dude who ran a local ISP and connected to it using a 14.4 baud modem (he might have ran the isp through his house). He also had a small web server where I can host my website.
I had all sorts of fancy stuff like marquees and blinking tags. I think I even used a table to lay out certain graphics and text. Those were good times.
Yep. In 1995 the main lesson of the web seemed to be "you can be an author." (Good luck finding bus schedules...) So I cobbled together a Pavoni espresso website in raw HTML, most of my efforts going into the drawings, and for a time it was most of the traffic on our department web server:
One wondered then as much as ever about things one read on the web. For example, Kopi Luwak was a legendary coffee fished out of paradoxurus marsupial feces. All references on the web could be traced to a single source, yet apparently this is true.
Yes! This was the big one. I got to college in late ‘95 and almost immediately someone in my dorm showed me how to both code HTML tags and look at page source in Netscape. That began an iterative feedback loop of learning how to make things based on what I saw already out there — and looking at personal home pages (at my school or not) was a great creative playground. By ‘97 I was hand-coding pages for small businesses in the school incubator, several departments, and my own page. I don’t remember getting a hold of many books for a couple more years. And the only GUI tool I remember in use around then was FrontPage, but it spit out so much redundant code and I never took to it.
I was a big fan of the Mac semi-WYSIWYG tool PageSpinner, which would show you the raw source but style the tags more subtly, style the text accordingly (size and bold/italic), and had wizards to insert whatever tag you needed and resolve the relative hierarchical image paths required https://i.imgur.com/QIrXhyj.jpg
I think I designed my first website using HoTMetaL. The WYSIWYG interface was basic but worked but once you hit the limitations of it then at least you could edit the HTML directly.
Ah yes, Frontpage Express. That was how I built my first website, which still exists: http://cm.thran.uk/archive/really4theweb/ (feat. <BODY BGSOUND="something.mid"> for those of you who still rock IE). There are also some embedded java applets fumbling in the dark for the JRE plugin that was hoisted by a long deprecated API.
I think that was the year my internet career started. It began when one evening I was hanging out in an internet cafe. At some point, someone said "Oh there comes the guy who owns the company that provides us with internet access". I was so excited that I jumped at that guy and started bombarding him with questions. About how this whole magic internet thing works. My enthusiasm seemed to be contagious and after a while he said "You know what, I'll give you an ssh account on our server. Then you can build your own website on our server under /~mg.
I was mesmerized. I knew absolutely nothing about ssh, http, html etc. But I knew I had to spend the night figuring it out. And have a website up and running the next morning.
So I ran home and started reading and trying things out. As I couldn't really see much use in all that html gibberish, I just used full size images for every page and interlinked them via the <map> element. Hurray! Next morning my website was online! Mostly built by just using Photoshop :)
I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.
For me it was a teacher showing his basic web page at the school's computer lab. I wanted to do the same! He showed me how to edit the source in Notepad, and watch the result in IE. To get me started, he gave me a floppy disk with a single index.html file with some tags. I played around with that for ages.
To actually host the page, ~10 old me didn't know what to do. But a relative in Denmark had suddenly become the "webmaster" for her local government, and gotten to learn some stuff.
Remotely teaching me ftp or ssh was out of the question, but I got tipped about Tripod/Lycos. They had an online interface where I could upload a file! And then later she showed me how to apply for dot.tk and have my very own domain. Very cool 8)
Was a bit dormant, though. What more could I do than adding some texts and under construction gifs?
Then the Harry Potter craze hit. Lots of people made cool websites, and I wanted to join! To up the game, me and a friend made stuff in FrontPage. Still manually uploading one and one file through Tripod's web interface. I could do so much more than the little HTML I had managed to do in Notepad! Then I later got to spend a day shadowing a professional web developer, and she gave me the CD for the previous version of Dreamweaver! First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.
As many others, my Harry Potter page was a "school" where people could do stuff and earn house points. But not knowing programming, everything was static and I had to manually edit and reupload files. Luckily only like two friends used the page hehe. But other HP pages were dynamic! How? I had to learn PHP!
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As an aside, it's curious how many of those professionals I interacted with the first years were women. Companies/govagencies felt they needed a presence, but didn't care much, and just gave the task to someone else already doing communication/admin work. And they learned on the job and suddenly became the first experts here.
> First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.
I think this is more or less an argument in favor of tools that are helpful to the developer, like feature rich IDEs with parameter hints and autocomplete/suggestions, text editors with plugins that give you a similar experience or even a little bit of AI help.
Some people have the attitude that you might want to learn a language/framework with just a text editor to know the internals, but I think that if you want results fast and focus on solving problems (getting the site up and running) quickly, then tools like these are invaluable!
Don't you love it how these were the times when you approached someone you didn't even know and he gave you SSH access to his server, just like that? That's also my experience from that era - somehow people trusted each other more back then and I also got access to one company's server just from hanging on their IRC channel and trying to be helpful.
Exactly. I had an open (read/write) ftp server in beginning of the nineties. It was nice, people could put files in there, retrieve what they wanted.
By the middle of the nineties I had to write-protect everything and leave only an "incoming" directory with write access, because some jerk deleted everything just for fun.
By the end of the nineties I was fed up with everyone trying to use my "incoming" directory for storing warez/pr0n so I gave up (yes I tried setting it write-only but what's the point ?). Well, it was fine while it lasted, the community of people on the internet definitely changed in a few years, and it didn't get any better in the following decades.
Mine to. I use to use those hacking challenge websites ngsec, try2hack.nl and then ended up with talking to a Dutch guy who set me up a old box out of generosity hosted on his home net somewhere in NL.
In 1997, SSH was relatively new, a couple years old (looked it up).
It did spread very quickly, as the issue it solves was quite obvious and there weren't a lot of competing solutions. So it's pretty possible that that was the actual tech used.
In my experience, it wasn't until 2003ish that telnet really started getting replaced by SSH, with telnet access being routinely shut down. My memory is really more around dev environments, prod envs may have been a lot more locked down.
Back in 1995, we paid equivalent of almost $4000 for a PC with 133 MHz Pentium processor - don't remember the RAM or HDD, but it came with Windows 95. Since we lived somewhat rural back then, libraries were woefully outdated on the computer/IT department - both as far as books and actual PCs go.
The one bookstore we had, didn't really carry much of those things either. Most of my learning came through various PC magazine tutorials, and ordering books via said magazines. Or more realistically - trying to find out what other people worked or dabbled with IT in my little town, and trying to learn through them. Everything was very, very DIY and bootstrapped.
And just for the sake of nostalgia - one of the local PC-enthusiasts had parents that worked at the municipality, and managed to argue that we (the local PC "community") needed a space of our own. So we got this run-down part of an older school building, rent-free, for maybe 7 years.
As long as we paid the utility for that part, and any internet connection, we could pretty much do as pleased. You had probably a dozen or so guys pretty much living there, playing various game over LAN. Doom, Quake, Age of empires, and what not.
Another part of guys were mostly tinkering with websites, software, or what not. Still vividly remember all the Borland boxes laying around. And of course, the more free spirited guys "Buy what? No, let me show you our warez".
But you know what - we made money, real and good money, from just churning out websites. There were really no beauty standards, little (to no) functionality, and hosting was usually done via some local dude that run a bunch of servers out of his shop.
A PC was actually not necessary getting started. I wrote my first Web-site (called "homepage" in those days) in 1994 on my Atari ST I had purchased in 1989. I uploaded it via FTP to my university Web space and checked it via telnetting to the text-based browser Lynx[1] on the university's remote host. Later I used Lynx directly on my Atari ST. This was all done via a 1,200 baud modem.
I don't think parent necessarily meant "PC" like that, but rather than you needed to buy a pricey device to get into the space.
For example, the Atari ST launched at June 1985 for the price of $800. Adjusted to today's prices (via https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), that would be ~$2200, which is a lot for most people.
So I think the point still stands. The barrier to entry was acquiring the device in order to be able to do anything related to it.
I dug a website out of an old archive last week. I needed it as a documentary maker has been in touch and some of their questions are answered by just looking at this website from the mid-late 1990s.
It still works. All I used at the time were server side includes and a bit of PERL that was in a /cgi-bin/ . Sure there are some dead links (to some real media files hosted by a third party long-since defunkt) but mostly it just works as SSI is still supported in most web servers and fastCGI exists.
I'm installing it on a laptop tomorrow morning to show the documentary maker. Interestingly they were interviewing me about one thing, but the site shows another thing... that we were one of the first music acts to allow the full download of an album online. This was in early 1998 when we put the entire catalogue online as media files to listen to (first as Real Audio files, later as mp3s, before also embracing Napster and even making live concerts available for free via that).
It's good stuff, early web sites were fun and exciting.
The best feature of this website which was for a record label, is that the bands didn't know what to do with a website so instead I gave control to fans... the whole site was user-generated content as far back as 1996. Things like guitar tabs, lyrics, mishearings, stories, fan artwork... the official record label site was made by fans and just became an archive of everything that the fans and label together cared about. In 1996 this was a link on every page "email if you want to add your content"... it worked.
I verified with the band (Belle & Sebastian) that it was legit and they wanted me to be involved, but beyond that I'll find out tomorrow.
From the prelim questions, I understand that their angle is looking at the early web and the music industry and that this is one of two they're initially researching. They're interested in Belle & Sebastian due to the 1999 Brit Award win https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_Awards_1999#Belle_&_Sebas... and how websites connected fans to bands. They're also interested in Wilco as they believed that to be the first instance of a band publishing a whole album on their website (but B&S did that before, but I thought we were late to the game so someone else must've been first). It sounded early stage though, so I figure their research will inform and help evolve their ideas.
You find a free (or dirt cheap) CGI-BIN web hoster and FTP your programs there. Files for your message board or site counter are saved in the /CGI-BIN/ directory too. You upload new files to run arbitrary commands and use those commands to walk around the system that you otherwise have no access to. You discover another customer on the same shared host who is selling real estate in Alabama. You consider it strange that all the users have the same group ID, and so can access each other's files. Later on you learn about suEXEC and get some cash to help somebody configure their web server. Two decades later you're doing basically the same job and wonder why it feels so much more difficult now.
I hosted my first website with CSoft back in the last 90s after getting kicked off the student server at Uni for hogging too many resources. Had a C executable dropped in cgi-bin doing all the heavy lifting.
Major deja-vu 20 years later throwing a Golang executable up on a server; really felt like I was back where I started.
Probably closer to 1999 but my first foray into web programming was Neopets. You could upload some HTML for your virtual pet and they'd host it for you. Spent ages making fancy animated text gifs from random tutorials only to realize that my friends couldn't see images that I had hotlinked to "C:\My Documents\awesome.gif". That brought me on a quest to find external hosting which led me to Spaceports.com and then IRC, mIRC scripting and then PHP... and now it's my livelihood. I just wanted to thank Neopets for giving kids the chance to program something and a non-scammy place to host it. I imagine I'm not the only one whose career was kickstarted by a virtual pet.
I still have a hard copy of it :D
My father printed it out back then. Good times.
Edit correction. Can't find the printout. Maybe it's still at home? I still got my basic and turbo pascal binder and some weird shit I can't quite remember.
Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML, the university printed them and placed boxes of the booklets in the lobby of half a dozen of the main buildings so people could just grab them. And I think about half the student body did.
A couple of weeks later I was hitching a ride with someone and we started talking about what we do. He said that "I'm teaching people this new thing called HTML". Then he reached back into the back seat and pulled out a booklet. He had a whole box of them. Apparently he had just taken a whole box of them from the university and was using this as his course material.
I never told him I wrote it. Actually, I was a bit proud that someone could make a living using teaching materials I'd written and I didn't want to embarrass him. (And since the university had printed boxes of them it wasn't like there was any shortage. My main mission was to get people to use WWW so I didn't mind).
I'd probably cringe if I read it today :-).
(However the thing I'm most proud of from that period was to ensure that policies on student access to publishing materials on their homepages without needing to get the content explicitly approved were adopted across norwegian universities. There was a meeting between the universities to figure out what policies to adopt. I didn't have any real authority, but I managed to convince everyone that what students put on their homepages is none of our business as long as they don't break the law or hurt themselves or someone else.
During that period I also learned that one of the most efficient ways to kill bad policies is to follow them to the letter and generate so much work for other people they need to rethink the policies. :-))
Readit News
This article is missing two important ways to learn HTML back in the day:
1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS. Everything was right there in one file. If you saw a site you liked, just take a copy of the source and tweak it locally to understand how it works.
2) GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.
Here's a live example of a 1995 website: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/
Look at the source. It's easy to understand the basics of HTML just by comparing the source and output. Deeply nested divs and tables were not a thing yet.
Not mentioning the GUI tools was a pretty poor omission: Frontpage was everywhere back then. I personally hand-coded but had to use it in my first professional role in '98.
Even the books were wrong. I had (it might still be in a box at my parents) a 1st Ed. copy of HTML: The Definitive Guide, later followed by other O'Reilly books: CSS Def. Guide and one I wore to death as it was the MDN of the day: the DHTML Def. Guide.
That site is awesome; I had to look and yep, allcaps!
Yes, but also in the following years, js and css were simple too. I learned js and css (well html as well I guess, but that took like... a day) initally by reading website source, before minification and obfuscation, webpack, SASS, etc.
It's a beautiful thing to use a web application where all the internals are visible and tweakable. These days I try to develop with as little obfuscation as possible, but it sure is going against the grain. See https://dev.to/open-wc/developing-without-a-build-1-introduc... and Snowpack.
Yeah here we are, Netscape Composer, released in 1997 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
I think I built my first web page with that... LOL. Long time ago now :)
Soon the even bigger revelation came: It's all just plain text!
Also: I don't remember anyone using books. The web was much smaller back than, but if it has had anything in abundance it was resources for learning how to make websites.
That's why I included right-click-protection scripts on all my pages! Couldn't have my friends steal my cool gifs (that I'd shamelessly stolen somewhere else) or copy my cool menu hover effect or whatever!
Of course all this was futile, but we weren't knowledgeable enough to know better, heh. At some point, I also had a script that would "encrypt" my HTML. Looking back, it was just base64 encoding the source, and then through JS converting that string to html and inserting into the body dom element.
That would work unless you were in the vast unlucky majority with Windows and no telnet or no access to a Linux / Unix server.
Anyway, I did it plenty of times. Then wget and curl.
Almost 30 years have passed and this website still works and renders perfectly in modern browsers! Will we be able to say the same about current websites 20 years from now?
Isn't it funny how these early sites managed to be completely functional and useful in their plain and unpretentious way without pulling down gigabytes of cruft designed primarily to make it look like you aren't looking at a website. Given the choice between the 2022 and 1993 presentations of IMDB, I'd take the earlier one in a heartbeat.
- familiar font on grey background is quite readable
- blue underlined link tell you what to click on
- link turning violet to indicate you've visited it already? Genius!
Fired up opera, which still had cached websites in the tabs - most of them long gone. Funny to see 2006-era Facebook in the flesh.
Tried to fire up a some news websites, and ended up with BSOD rather quickly. Chewed right through the paltry memory.
edit: I guess it is possible to browse some modern websites by disabling javascript, media downloads, and what not. But it's probably going to be a limited experience as far as functionality goes.
Maybe some browser specific features but only very few websites use those.
I personally think it could be getting better (at least in the realm of Government websites)
The UK Gov Design System for example:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
Clean, accessible and functional first.
This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.
Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.
It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!
I knew one dude who ran a local ISP and connected to it using a 14.4 baud modem (he might have ran the isp through his house). He also had a small web server where I can host my website.
I had all sorts of fancy stuff like marquees and blinking tags. I think I even used a table to lay out certain graphics and text. Those were good times.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/coffee/
One wondered then as much as ever about things one read on the web. For example, Kopi Luwak was a legendary coffee fished out of paradoxurus marsupial feces. All references on the web could be traced to a single source, yet apparently this is true.
Yes! This was the big one. I got to college in late ‘95 and almost immediately someone in my dorm showed me how to both code HTML tags and look at page source in Netscape. That began an iterative feedback loop of learning how to make things based on what I saw already out there — and looking at personal home pages (at my school or not) was a great creative playground. By ‘97 I was hand-coding pages for small businesses in the school incubator, several departments, and my own page. I don’t remember getting a hold of many books for a couple more years. And the only GUI tool I remember in use around then was FrontPage, but it spit out so much redundant code and I never took to it.
Deleted Comment
An artifact of its time. If the Web was designed today it would certainly not have viewable source.
Also I once found this humble getting started guide for FPE, miraculously still online with screenshots: http://www.iwaynet.net/support/Web/FrontPage/fpe_create.html
Webmonkey & Castro's book = everything you need.
I was mesmerized. I knew absolutely nothing about ssh, http, html etc. But I knew I had to spend the night figuring it out. And have a website up and running the next morning.
So I ran home and started reading and trying things out. As I couldn't really see much use in all that html gibberish, I just used full size images for every page and interlinked them via the <map> element. Hurray! Next morning my website was online! Mostly built by just using Photoshop :)
I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.
To actually host the page, ~10 old me didn't know what to do. But a relative in Denmark had suddenly become the "webmaster" for her local government, and gotten to learn some stuff.
Remotely teaching me ftp or ssh was out of the question, but I got tipped about Tripod/Lycos. They had an online interface where I could upload a file! And then later she showed me how to apply for dot.tk and have my very own domain. Very cool 8)
Was a bit dormant, though. What more could I do than adding some texts and under construction gifs?
Then the Harry Potter craze hit. Lots of people made cool websites, and I wanted to join! To up the game, me and a friend made stuff in FrontPage. Still manually uploading one and one file through Tripod's web interface. I could do so much more than the little HTML I had managed to do in Notepad! Then I later got to spend a day shadowing a professional web developer, and she gave me the CD for the previous version of Dreamweaver! First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.
As many others, my Harry Potter page was a "school" where people could do stuff and earn house points. But not knowing programming, everything was static and I had to manually edit and reupload files. Luckily only like two friends used the page hehe. But other HP pages were dynamic! How? I had to learn PHP!
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As an aside, it's curious how many of those professionals I interacted with the first years were women. Companies/govagencies felt they needed a presence, but didn't care much, and just gave the task to someone else already doing communication/admin work. And they learned on the job and suddenly became the first experts here.
I think this is more or less an argument in favor of tools that are helpful to the developer, like feature rich IDEs with parameter hints and autocomplete/suggestions, text editors with plugins that give you a similar experience or even a little bit of AI help.
Some people have the attitude that you might want to learn a language/framework with just a text editor to know the internals, but I think that if you want results fast and focus on solving problems (getting the site up and running) quickly, then tools like these are invaluable!
By the middle of the nineties I had to write-protect everything and leave only an "incoming" directory with write access, because some jerk deleted everything just for fun.
By the end of the nineties I was fed up with everyone trying to use my "incoming" directory for storing warez/pr0n so I gave up (yes I tried setting it write-only but what's the point ?). Well, it was fine while it lasted, the community of people on the internet definitely changed in a few years, and it didn't get any better in the following decades.
How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?
Likewise, IRC was also created by a fellow finn back in 1988, Jarkko "Wiz" Oikarinen, at the University of Oulu.
It did spread very quickly, as the issue it solves was quite obvious and there weren't a lot of competing solutions. So it's pretty possible that that was the actual tech used.
Back in 1995, we paid equivalent of almost $4000 for a PC with 133 MHz Pentium processor - don't remember the RAM or HDD, but it came with Windows 95. Since we lived somewhat rural back then, libraries were woefully outdated on the computer/IT department - both as far as books and actual PCs go.
The one bookstore we had, didn't really carry much of those things either. Most of my learning came through various PC magazine tutorials, and ordering books via said magazines. Or more realistically - trying to find out what other people worked or dabbled with IT in my little town, and trying to learn through them. Everything was very, very DIY and bootstrapped.
And just for the sake of nostalgia - one of the local PC-enthusiasts had parents that worked at the municipality, and managed to argue that we (the local PC "community") needed a space of our own. So we got this run-down part of an older school building, rent-free, for maybe 7 years.
As long as we paid the utility for that part, and any internet connection, we could pretty much do as pleased. You had probably a dozen or so guys pretty much living there, playing various game over LAN. Doom, Quake, Age of empires, and what not.
Another part of guys were mostly tinkering with websites, software, or what not. Still vividly remember all the Borland boxes laying around. And of course, the more free spirited guys "Buy what? No, let me show you our warez".
But you know what - we made money, real and good money, from just churning out websites. There were really no beauty standards, little (to no) functionality, and hosting was usually done via some local dude that run a bunch of servers out of his shop.
A PC was actually not necessary getting started. I wrote my first Web-site (called "homepage" in those days) in 1994 on my Atari ST I had purchased in 1989. I uploaded it via FTP to my university Web space and checked it via telnetting to the text-based browser Lynx[1] on the university's remote host. Later I used Lynx directly on my Atari ST. This was all done via a 1,200 baud modem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
For example, the Atari ST launched at June 1985 for the price of $800. Adjusted to today's prices (via https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), that would be ~$2200, which is a lot for most people.
So I think the point still stands. The barrier to entry was acquiring the device in order to be able to do anything related to it.
It still works. All I used at the time were server side includes and a bit of PERL that was in a /cgi-bin/ . Sure there are some dead links (to some real media files hosted by a third party long-since defunkt) but mostly it just works as SSI is still supported in most web servers and fastCGI exists.
I'm installing it on a laptop tomorrow morning to show the documentary maker. Interestingly they were interviewing me about one thing, but the site shows another thing... that we were one of the first music acts to allow the full download of an album online. This was in early 1998 when we put the entire catalogue online as media files to listen to (first as Real Audio files, later as mp3s, before also embracing Napster and even making live concerts available for free via that).
It's good stuff, early web sites were fun and exciting.
The best feature of this website which was for a record label, is that the bands didn't know what to do with a website so instead I gave control to fans... the whole site was user-generated content as far back as 1996. Things like guitar tabs, lyrics, mishearings, stories, fan artwork... the official record label site was made by fans and just became an archive of everything that the fans and label together cared about. In 1996 this was a link on every page "email if you want to add your content"... it worked.
I verified with the band (Belle & Sebastian) that it was legit and they wanted me to be involved, but beyond that I'll find out tomorrow.
From the prelim questions, I understand that their angle is looking at the early web and the music industry and that this is one of two they're initially researching. They're interested in Belle & Sebastian due to the 1999 Brit Award win https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_Awards_1999#Belle_&_Sebas... and how websites connected fans to bands. They're also interested in Wilco as they believed that to be the first instance of a band publishing a whole album on their website (but B&S did that before, but I thought we were late to the game so someone else must've been first). It sounded early stage though, so I figure their research will inform and help evolve their ideas.
Major deja-vu 20 years later throwing a Golang executable up on a server; really felt like I was back where I started.
I remember using this site primarily to learn about HTML: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224220115/http://www.htmlgo...
I also used Netscape's HTML tool, played around with HotMetalPro. Here is a link that somewhat is a reference to 1997: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/html_en/kap_2/backbon...
Edit correction. Can't find the printout. Maybe it's still at home? I still got my basic and turbo pascal binder and some weird shit I can't quite remember.
It also had a French version. I remember it as being a very good resource.
A couple of weeks later I was hitching a ride with someone and we started talking about what we do. He said that "I'm teaching people this new thing called HTML". Then he reached back into the back seat and pulled out a booklet. He had a whole box of them. Apparently he had just taken a whole box of them from the university and was using this as his course material.
I never told him I wrote it. Actually, I was a bit proud that someone could make a living using teaching materials I'd written and I didn't want to embarrass him. (And since the university had printed boxes of them it wasn't like there was any shortage. My main mission was to get people to use WWW so I didn't mind).
I'd probably cringe if I read it today :-).
(However the thing I'm most proud of from that period was to ensure that policies on student access to publishing materials on their homepages without needing to get the content explicitly approved were adopted across norwegian universities. There was a meeting between the universities to figure out what policies to adopt. I didn't have any real authority, but I managed to convince everyone that what students put on their homepages is none of our business as long as they don't break the law or hurt themselves or someone else.
During that period I also learned that one of the most efficient ways to kill bad policies is to follow them to the letter and generate so much work for other people they need to rethink the policies. :-))