The Internet Wayback Machine is an incredible resource for looking at what the Internet looked like years ago. I’ve wanted to dig up one of my old projects for a while and I decided to look at Archive.org to see if they might have a copy (they did). But in researching that project, I came across my first website from the early 90’s in high school.
Bronx High School of Science was one of the first schools to get internet access. I was fortunate enough to work with a teacher that allowed us into his office during breaks and lunch to use one of the 5 terminals in school. It was a Unix based system. I don’t remember which flavor, I just remember that it was running X11. Learning how to use the system and how to find information in Gopherspace or use Mosaic to surf the web a lot of fun and we must have spent every day in that office (it didn’t hurt that it was also one of the few rooms in the building with air conditioning).
The Internet was very different back then. There was no Google. There was no Javascript or CSS to create web applications. No wordpress or real content creation tools, No videos or any other rich media that exists on the web today… Just simple HTML to layout and format web pages. Most pages were just lists of information. In fact, there wasn’t much of a web back then at all. Instead of web browsers, it was more common to find things using the Gopher protocol, basically a text based and menu driven way to find information around the Internet.
I had no idea what I wanted to build a web page about. So, I created one about skiing. At the time I was a ski instructor and I used the site to aggregate links to other skiing resources.