Friday, March 25, 2005
The disastrous mis-install of a program earlier in the month that wiped out all of my email for the past three months and that also whacked all of the major settings on my computer was a wake-up call, and with Erika and the girls gone until Sunday afternoon, I set about doing a very thorough backup of all of our digital photos, documents and other things collected across various computers and back up data CDs and DVDs.
One interesting discovery was finding my very first set of Web pages I cobbled together – all the way back to 1994! (October 27 apparently, at least as a revision date). A picture of it appears below, and a link to it is also available...
Both companies mentioned on the page no longer exist, and all of the links on the page are dead – an issue which has got to be a concern to Web archivists (though The Wayback Machine helps a lot). It was hosted on Interlog, which was in fact the second Internet service I subscribed to, and the first to offer Web hosting. A lot came out of this initial Web page. At the time I did it I was a Technical Writer for Delrina, and what I ended up learning from this and subsequent Web pages I used to write a manual for their "Cyberjack" Web browser late 1994, which in turn lead to working on first the Delrina Web site, and then the early Symantec Web site, and so on to other firm's Web sites over the succeeding years. Not to mention four (so far) books on the Web and Web technology, and a series of courses taught at the PLC first on basic HTML, then CSS, and now PHP/MySQL and Information Architecture. So a lot can be traced back to this very simple, unassuming and utterly, painfully basic Web page.
Unfortunately I have not been able to locate the whole of this early site from my backups, but with luck I'll be able to uncover more. Web space in those days was miniscule, and these days I could host that original site – which I remember strained the limits of what was allowed at the time – several hundred times over. The only thing I wished I had saved at the time was a copy of the early Delrina and Cyberjack Web sites, though I notice that at least a few pages of the immediate post Symantec-takeover versions are represented on The Wayback Machine (as you'll see if you click on either of the previous two links).
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