Ancient Web Design History

[Jonathan]

Seeing as good ol' ThomasW started the Ancient PC History topic,
I figured we'd best make a brother-topic

Anywhose, when did YOU first get into web design?
Or heck, even any sort of programming, computer or web!

Cheers,

[bd2003]

Oh wow... this is gonna date me badly, but how's about CBasic on a Commodore 64? When it was "leading edge"?

[zenfort]

There are some examples of my first stuff at archive.org.
I started an artists/friends site in 1994.
Archive.org didn't start until later so their archived versions don't start until 1996.
xenonarts
Some of the graphics appear to be missing but I did most of the various artist and organzations pages.

namaste zenfort

[ThomasW]

I built my first website in 1997, the company I worked for (still do actually) kept all of the procedure memos for the phone staff in .hlp files. We used RoboHelp to create them. Anyway we had about 800 meg worth of .hlp files, we used lots of images.
To conserve space on the network the IT guys decided we would convert the .hlp files to html files.
They gave me a program that would convert the files over but it did a lousy job. They also gave me a "Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours" book and a copy of FrontPage97. That was my training..I was a phone rep also, not like I knew what I was doing, my home PC was this POS 386sx-16.
So I banged around on it for a few weeks and actually figured out how to created a decent/useful site. The finished site was only around 30 meg and 13,000+ pages. Of course the PC's that the phone reps used were 486sx's with 8 meg of ram and would crap out if you loaded a browser so the site was useless. We used MACS for out fulfillment and the SGA sessions were real memory eaters. We stripped out all extraneous things from the site but all it created was the awful looking thing that still did not work.
So for about 18 month they ran both systems until all the PC's on the floor got upgraded.

I got out the the department soon after I first created the site, they still use it and it still looks lousy. That department is only a shell of what it used to be so it is not surprising they have not tried to upgrade the site.

[Jonathan]

13K+ worth of pages? Good lord

[rsowen]

My first computer was a Commodore PET. Bought it used in 1979 with a printer for $1500. No word processors at the time: I am the first person I know who printed a resume on one -- using binary (which is not even machine language). Published a machine language program in RUN magazine.

My first HTML Web pages were course materials that I posted for a Summer 1995 class (I'm a professor). That beat the heck out of using Gopher. That was just two months or so after Netscape launched its version 1 browser; most of my students accessed the course materials using the text-based Lynx browser because neither Mosaic nor Netscape were installed on anything.

By 2000, I was working for a consulting company, building an application that can secretly track mouse movements within a browser page. Can you say "dot com layoff"? So nobody would hire me because I was, according to the tech recruiting companies, too inexperienced. They all claimed to have a lot of people with resumes showing over ten years of HTML or Java or whatever kind of Web programming experience! (Note that Netscape wasn't incorporated until Nov. 94 and was without a product at that time.)