This thread made me want to look for the website I made in 1996 as a 14 year old in the Wayback machine. Sadly, it was not available.
I did find my website made as a 16 year old. Unfortunately all of the images were missing. From what I remember, it was actually a pretty nice design. I think I'd still be proud of it if I had built it today.
Back in 1997, I got connected to the internet. Thinking it was owned by a single company, the first time I ran across a site like this... made me want to develop websites. I thought to myself, Why did this internet company make suck a crappy webpage. Then I found out it was a personal home page, and anyone could do it... I then spent the next 5 years making awesome sites just like this, sans MC Hammer.
I remember when I was 13 and first realized that I could HTML was what webpages were and that I could write it myself. It was 1997 and Geocities was my best friend. I was so excited.
I'm actually sad that I didn't put my first website on geocities now! I had my own web hosting from my ISP, so I had a fabulously easy to remember url of "homepages.tig.com.au/~liedra" which was lost as soon as my family upgraded to a cable connection from dialup. And no, archive.org didn't manage to catch it :( I think it had a page devoted to Nick Cave and some terrible poetry! Go go websites of a 17 year old! :)
The interesting thing was that at the time my friends and I (who had ISP-based homepages) looked down on Geocities because it was "lame" comparatively. Now I'm sad that I don't have any records of that original page (possibly on an ancient CD-R though? but most of those early ones have degraded now...)
When I got an account for tilde.club, I used it to host the first website I ever made. Now you can see the oldest Dreamweaver based html page I made from when I was 15: https://tilde.club/~rememberlenny/
So much nostalgia in those gifs. I built my first website on Geocities in 1997. It was devoted to all the PC games my middle school self loved to play. I have fond memories of "visiting my neighbors" by checking out the addresses next to mine. e.g. geocities.com/TimesSquare/1000, geocities.com/TimesSquare/1001, etc. It was always fun to see a Guestbook entry from one of the people with sites next to mine.
It was 96 and I was 6 year old. I built offline pages, by modifying websites in the web after I found that I can see the html source code. Though back then I didn't know how to read yet so it was more about testing out how the layout looks nice instead of the content. Would still have the pages if my really old laptop's hard drive would still work.
Oh geeze... This brings back memories. I didn't do Geocities. I took an HTML class at my local ISP (yes that existed). This was the earliest version I could find on Wayback Machine:
It was glorious. It really was. It felt like a childhood Christmas or Birthday every day for months. It was such an exciting time I could hardly sleep. That was 1997-98 after I broke free from AOL and started using Internet Explorer to surf the "real" web.
I created my first website in 1998 simply because I had an idea I wanted to share and it went semi-viral. It wasn't about money or fame or anything else. 10 pages, Front Page 2.0, largest page 3K, $29.95/month hosting. Of course, if you count the 7K logo graphic (gif) the pages were really 10K!
In my adult life only a few things have given me that same feeling of unbounded childhood excitement and freedom. Perhaps that's why I can't give up yet on the "promise" of the web even though corporate control and government surveillance seem to increasing daily.
This is how I remember website development. Those were extremely fun and exciting times. 1997 was my freshman year of high school. Geocities and Anglefire FTW.
I built my first site in ~1997, and my primary email address is still webmaster@. Nevertheless, I do feel that these early-Internet nostalgia posts mostly forget how crappy many webpages were back in the day. Blinking text, marquees, animated gifs, frames, inline fonts, ActiveX, "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 3", popup windows, tables for layout, terrible search, etc. Today's sites are often bloated, but those of the past had their own issues.
For me personally, the appeal of the web back then was not that it was good, rather it was new.
You know what? Me too. I miss Geocities and I never realized until just now.
That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn.
And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarrassingly bad, but that's not the point.
I think more than anything in my career, services like Geocities inspired me.
See the internet? You can make it. You can do this stuff. It's not that hard.
Nobody else in my life told me that. Nobody explained to me that creating things on a computer wasn't magic, and if I wasn't enticed with such an easy website creator I may have never known.
What do I give my kids? What do I give my little cousins, right now, at the age of 10, that even comes close?
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Looking around there seem to be a few, but they're all so template-centric that I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I had them back then.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~nopatec/
Dreamweaver special :)
still can't find the geocities site I had in 1997 though...damn
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