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susandennisOne key thing happened before I started working at the little PR agency. I was still at IBM twiddling my thumbs for (very good) pay. It happened one Friday night.
It was 1995 and I was still active on electronic bulletin boards and Prodigy and Compuserve and in my free time, I was playing bridge on OK Bridge (at that time it was an independent server that served up excellent players from around the world). Each of these services required a separate dial in. Thinking back on it now, it was ridiculous. At the time, it was miraculous.
Then, one day, I signed up with something called an Internet Service Provider. Yet another number to dial into. Only this time it offered a bunch of different services. Gopher and IRC and email and web pages. It was very cool.
I subscribed to a magazine (the kind with pages brought to me via the USPS mail carrier once a month) called Internet World. I gobbled up every single word in every single issue. At IBM, I had massive free time but no internet. (I know, a crime, right??)
One Thursday night, I found the latest issue of Internet World in my mail and did not read it. I saved it to take and read at work on Friday. One of the articles was "How my son and I built a web site in a weekend" ... I read it very carefully and took copious notes at work that day. If some dude and his 7 year old could build a website, I sure could. And I had a weekend. Step back.
I did it. Trial and many errors. Many. www.eskimo.com:80/~susan/ I just looked in the wayback machine and they have a version from 1997. It's bad enough. The 1994 version was way worse.
Ok, here, you can see it. There's a midi file that tries to download just hit cancel. Judge, judge, judge away.
There was only one browser that had any kind of range - Netscape. I think if I remember correctly, you had six font sizes to chose from but it was all the same font. There weren't tables yet OR background colors - those came with Netscape 2 (that was a big day). Web pages themselves were very simple to do because there weren't a lot of options. Websites were a bit trickier because there were no tools. But mainly I was clueless. I took a photograph and a floppy disk to the copy shop to get it digitized. The guy asked what format I wanted. I had no idea. He did not know what a web page was. We were a pair. He finally gave me a gif copy and a jpg copy so it worked out. I had that picture on my website forever and even used it for LJ when I first started this journal.
Anyway... by Monday, I had a website and it was fab.
Tuesday, I got a call from the guy who would soon be my boss and he said - I kid you not - "Do you happen to know anything about something called web pages?"
Seriously, Forest Gump ain't got nothing on me.
I left IBM and walked into his office a couple of months later as his Web Advisor. hahahaha
To be continued
It was 1995 and I was still active on electronic bulletin boards and Prodigy and Compuserve and in my free time, I was playing bridge on OK Bridge (at that time it was an independent server that served up excellent players from around the world). Each of these services required a separate dial in. Thinking back on it now, it was ridiculous. At the time, it was miraculous.
Then, one day, I signed up with something called an Internet Service Provider. Yet another number to dial into. Only this time it offered a bunch of different services. Gopher and IRC and email and web pages. It was very cool.
I subscribed to a magazine (the kind with pages brought to me via the USPS mail carrier once a month) called Internet World. I gobbled up every single word in every single issue. At IBM, I had massive free time but no internet. (I know, a crime, right??)
One Thursday night, I found the latest issue of Internet World in my mail and did not read it. I saved it to take and read at work on Friday. One of the articles was "How my son and I built a web site in a weekend" ... I read it very carefully and took copious notes at work that day. If some dude and his 7 year old could build a website, I sure could. And I had a weekend. Step back.
I did it. Trial and many errors. Many. www.eskimo.com:80/~susan/ I just looked in the wayback machine and they have a version from 1997. It's bad enough. The 1994 version was way worse.
Ok, here, you can see it. There's a midi file that tries to download just hit cancel. Judge, judge, judge away.
There was only one browser that had any kind of range - Netscape. I think if I remember correctly, you had six font sizes to chose from but it was all the same font. There weren't tables yet OR background colors - those came with Netscape 2 (that was a big day). Web pages themselves were very simple to do because there weren't a lot of options. Websites were a bit trickier because there were no tools. But mainly I was clueless. I took a photograph and a floppy disk to the copy shop to get it digitized. The guy asked what format I wanted. I had no idea. He did not know what a web page was. We were a pair. He finally gave me a gif copy and a jpg copy so it worked out. I had that picture on my website forever and even used it for LJ when I first started this journal.
Anyway... by Monday, I had a website and it was fab.
Tuesday, I got a call from the guy who would soon be my boss and he said - I kid you not - "Do you happen to know anything about something called web pages?"
Seriously, Forest Gump ain't got nothing on me.
I left IBM and walked into his office a couple of months later as his Web Advisor. hahahaha
To be continued
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-07 10:47 pm (UTC)I had to design a website for the preschool I was the director of in about 1998. I used, and I am not even kidding here, the Print Shop Deluxe graphic program. It was simple and fun to use, but then tricky doing the ftp stuff to get it launched. It was a ton of fun, and we had an awesome interactive website. I have no idea how I would do such a thing now--or even really what I was doing then!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-07 10:51 pm (UTC)And btw, ftp still rocks as an option :)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 01:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 03:51 am (UTC)I got into the web business (or New Media as it was called for a short while) because I was friends with the people who put up one of the earliest web servers in the world. I think that was in December 1992. Here's a screenshot of my homepage from 1996 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/apel/5404928397/in/photolist-9eBEUD-33yNBm). It's in color and has tables! Cyber! LOL
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 03:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 05:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 02:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-08 05:39 pm (UTC)Well done!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-10 01:35 pm (UTC)Strangely enough, I had a personal website on my University of New Mexico account, but never made one again after I graduated in 1997. I was really thankful when the blog format came along, because I always wanted to post stuff but didn't want to think of how it should be organized. Chronological is a great format!