Ancient web pages
Inspired by this post on mezzoblue, I decided to look once more on web.archive.org to see if I could find my very first homepage. I believe I had tried it once before but had been met with failure, since I could not remember the exact URL to the page (being very long and prone to frequent changes as the server setup changed over time). However this time I had the clever idea of trying the MIT SIPB website first. I chose the earliest time listed (May 19, 1997), which would have been when I was a junior in college. From there, I found the list of all student homepages, and there it was, right where I remembered it being!
Now, this page had been around since way before May 1997, but I guess the archive only starts at 1996 anyway, so it wouldn’t be able to find any of the first versions of my page, which would have probably dated back to 1995, during my freshman year. But nonetheless, you can see it’s quite retro, particularly those speckled blue horizontal rules (which I remember lovingly crafting using the primitive paint program on MIT’s unix system, Athena). I can’t take credit for the large masthead on top - some nice person with a more advanced paint program did that for me. And of course the pink streaky background was one of those innumerable backgrounds to be found on the web at that time. View the source and notice the nicely semantic HTML. Of course, I didn’t even know about using tables for layout or using font tags at the time!
And this next site, though it may not be the first web site or web application I got paid to do (that would be a tool for viewing QA data for computer peripherals I wrote one summer for Motorola), holds the distinction of being the first web site/web application I got paid to do that I can actually find a link to: the MIT Course Evaluation Guide. Unfortunately, this was never actually put into production, though I did get paid for developing it. The link here points to a test of the software, so many of the links don’t work, and none of the images do. This link shows a different part of the same application, but with the images shown correctly.
As you can see by the source code, by then I had discovered tables and the font tag. But the HTML still looks pretty clean, if you ask me. And the design doesn’t look all that awful, either. I guess simplicity ages well.
April 21st, 2004 at 12:24 am
What a fun blast from the past! Unfortunately, my first web pages have been lost, as they were never really published. And AT&T seems to have not been archived, so my return to the web three years ago is history, as well. It was plain, white and light yellow, and used way more tables than I want to think about. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and copied the table layout from someone else, thinking that it would teach me how to make a webpage. It taught me, all right.
I got better.
April 21st, 2004 at 5:56 pm
Your’s doesn’t look nearly as bad as most of the ones I’ve seen posted! Hey, are you going to use that photo I focused for you? I’m getting ready to take it down. Thanks for the feedback on my redesign!
April 21st, 2004 at 6:31 pm
I just grabbed the photo, Hass - I’ll get to putting it on the site later. Thanks!
April 21st, 2004 at 8:18 pm
Your welcome! Hey, just saw your post on asterisk…we both posted our first blog entry on March 16th! I had no idea, happy (belated) one month anniversary. :^)
April 21st, 2004 at 8:23 pm
Actually March 16th was my 23rd post.
April 22nd, 2004 at 9:47 am
Right, brain was clogged yesterday, sorry!