Wayback Wednesday: Our first websites!
On this week's edition of Wayback Wednesday, we're going to check out some of our own horrid creations from the past. Remember when the internet was just starting to come into its own? Prodigy and Compuserve were dying off and AOL was starting to lose its grip as various local ISPs started popping up. Suddenly, you could get the interwubs without going through some crazy, cumbersome interface program. You just dialed up the access number on your trusty 28.8 and opened up Netscape Navigator. The information superhighway (jebus, did we really call it that?) was open to you and there were websites galore!
And it wasn't terribly long before there were websites specifically dedicated to letting you make your very own. Angelfire! Tripod! Geocities! How we hailed thee! We scraped together some links and personal info, added lots of busy background colors, peppered it with rad animated gifs, threw it all together in a basic linear format using an amazing java-based WYSIWYG interface, and tossed in page counter to top it all off. Truly, we were as gods.
And now we get to go back and look at how amazingly horrible and ugly those first personal websites were. Mine was a Weird Al tribute page, with some info about myself and a few links to some favorite websites. I actually had another one previous to that, which was built into a "hit refresh a whole bunch to see new messages" html based chat site. I think the site was called WBS or something. It's long gone. But you can still check out my Geocities masterpiece.
Chris has a couple as well. Full of frames and pop-ups! And high school nerdery! Hoo-boy, what were we ever thinking?
C'mon down the to comments section, show some guts, and post your own abomination!
