gdanmitchell
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dmcphoto wrote:
It can be weird, great, or depressing, depending on the context. Sometimes all three at once.
I was taking pictures as a kid, long before the Internet existed. My first website used a provider called "tripod.com". I'm guessing that was sometime between 1995 and 1997. I believe you could have your own domain name and pay for hosting, or they'd host a more limited site as a subdomain of their own for "free". That's what I did. In the latter case you had to put up with pop-up ads. They were small by today's standards, but still obnoxious. Interestingly, Ethan Zukerman, the inventor of the pop-up ad, worked there at the time.
After playing with that for a couple years I got a domain name and moved the code to a real hosting service, and several others since then.
Of course everything has changed. Per Google, in 1995 less than 1% of the world population had Internet access, and there were approximately 23,500 websites in the world. There were also around 2.3 billion fewer people. All of that is indeed very weird to think about now.
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My initial experience with the web was a bit unusual.
At that time I was a college faculty member, and my field was electronic music. (The term “electronic music” meant something a bit different back then, but I digress…) In any case, I had used computers a lot for that purpose, as early as, well, let’s just say that my first experience was in a Defense Department funded artificial intelligence lab that was one of the nodes on the original Arpanet.)
In, I think, 1994 this thing called the world wide web was just appearing, and the Mosaic browser became available. There wasn’t a lot out there at that point, but i was intrigued. I got the browser and poked around. One day I ran into a mention of something called “MacHTTP,” which turned out to be a web server application that ran on desktop Macintosh computers. Intrigued, I downloaded it, having virtually no idea how it worked or what I’d do with it. (My office computer was one of the few at the time with access to the internet.)
I launched it and remember thinking, “What the hell! this is a web server!” I didn’t know how all of that worked, so I started “getting source” from various websites (there weren’t many, and they were primitive) and exploring it. From looking at the code I pretty quickly figured out how ot make a basic web page and serve it from… my office computer.
I started putting teaching resources online, and also taking part in various discussions about how to build web resources. In those heady days, normal (or close enough to normal) people like me could wade into some pretty cutting edge discussions. Before long I got it into my head that it could be useful for a college to have a website, so a fellow conspirator and I started mocking one up for my college. We brought it to the attention of the technology administrators at the college… who were aghast. I recall one saying that what I said I was doing — running a web site on my office computer — was not possible without access to their mainframe… and that I should knock it off.
My friend and I, understanding how campus politics works, went quiet… and continued to build the site. I mentioned it to a more visionary administrator who was very excited about it and asked us to do a public demonstration. We did, and she asked how soon it could be online, and we answered, “It already is.”
Shortly after that I came into contact with the people developing the “Manila” software and a tool called “Frontier,” which was an early web content management tool. I created one of the first online course using this along with an online community tool. Eventually I was given half-time release from teaching to work with our state education system to try to build these ideas out in the 107 campuses of the California community college system. And at about that time I became associated with an education program sponsored by Apple. (I was not an Apple employee, though I worked with folks there, including the last of their “distinguished scientists,” a posting that they eventually eliminated.)
That was a wild era. :-)
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. I want to turn it into a more commercial site, but my first couple of attempts failed and I don't see yet what I could do differently to make a third attempt work.
