By the time I left Nortel, I’d seen just enough of the World Wide Web to know that I wanted to learn more. I had no grand plan and certainly no idea that it would shape the rest of my career. I simply knew that something new was happening, and I wanted to be part of it. So, after a much-needed holiday in Turkey and a summer of more contract work, including illustrating the new banknotes for Newspapers in Wapping, in the autumn of 1995 I bought a Macintosh Performa 6200. The first thing I spent time with was the CD-Rom game Myst, a first-person adventure game set in a fantasy world of architectural puzzles, which came with the Macintosh.
But the Web beckoned, so I signed up with my nearest Internet Service Provider (ISP), Easynet and tried to navigate using their supplied browser, Netscape 1. But it was of little use. I needed to download Netscape 2, but each time it took up to 7 hours before failing. So I slept in the evening one Saturday and started at 12.01 on Sunday. After almost 13 hours, it succeeded and I was out of the starting gate.
I attended a 3-day HTML course in Thurloe Place, South Kensington, run by a guy who had designed the first website for one of the leading supermarkets. The site was only of a few pages, but to us he was a superstar! He introduced us to the newly-released Netscape 3.0, which allowed the use of frames, pages within pages. He taught us how to build a basic page with coloured text, graphics and a basic form. On the last day, we learned how to create an image map, an image that interacts by directing you to a new page when you click in specific areas. Immediately, I saw the potential.
Unlike today, there were no online courses, video tutorials or AI assistants to guide you. If you wanted to learn more about web design, you generally bought a book and taught yourself.
Mine was Laura Lemay’s Learn HTML. I learned more every day. Looking back, HTML was wonderfully simple. A page was just text with a few tags wrapped around it. If something went wrong, you opened the source code, stared at it for long enough and eventually spotted the mistake.
Once I’d learnt enough, I wanted somewhere to publish my work. Like many people discovering the web in the mid-1990s, I found GeoCities.
GeoCities divided the web into themed neighbourhoods, and I chose Cape Canaveral. My pages lived at an address ending something like:
…CapeCanaveral/Hangar/xxxx
where the final four digits identified my little plot of cyberspace. I can’t remember the exact number now – perhaps it was 8810 – and sadly that part of GeoCities has long since disappeared. Every so often I look to see whether anyone has reconstructed it, but if my pages still exist anywhere, they’re buried deep in internet archaeology.
The site itself was a collection of small experiments rather than anything polished. The one I remember most fondly was a simple Space Shuttle simulator that used image maps to let visitors work through the launch sequence, making decisions at each stage to see whether they reached orbit or ended up with a rather more spectacular result. By modern standards it was incredibly basic, but building something interactive that anyone in the world could use felt extraordinary. Alongside it were a handful of static HTML pages and graphics I’d created in Photoshop. Every page was written by hand and uploaded individually using FTP, but seeing something I’d built appear on a computer thousands of miles away still felt like magic.
That feeling is surprisingly difficult to explain today.
The modern web contains billions of pages and has become such an ordinary part of life that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it once seemed. In the mid-1990s, every new website felt like another small frontier settlement. There weren’t many of us, and every week somebody was discovering a new way to use this strange new medium.
I was still very much a beginner, but I could sense that the web was about to become something much bigger than a curiosity for universities and technology enthusiasts.
I just didn’t know that someone was about to pay me to build websites.
You can always find a full index of all the articles on the page under About me in the main menu.
Occult, Sci-fi & Military 