Web History – Page 2 – Occult, Sci-fi & Military

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.

Part 3

You can always find a full index of all the articles on the page under About me in the main menu.

Note: The names of people are probably aliases.

Studying aeronautical engineering at Queen Mary College in 1982 exposed me to programming using BASIC, but it was cumbersome. After a diploma and short career in Graphics, followed by a period in the music industry, I trained on desktop computers and contracted using QuarkXpress, PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop for companies like BT and Dorling Kindersley.

I arrived at Nortel on a short-term contract as a desktop publishing specialist, where I had to quickly learn Aldus FreeHand. My job was mainly visual: producing brochures, manuals and technical illustrations. Over time I became the person who produced many of the illustrations for their satellite and fibre optic equipment. Some of the diagrams were enormous by the standards of the time — complex FreeHand files with well over a hundred layers, sometimes requiring two people simply to manage the separation of the artwork.

I understood the communications technology visually long before I understood it technically.

The moment that changed everything came in late 1994. I was called into the office of one of the senior engineers, waiting for a photograph of a modified satellite component. While I was watching his computer screen, I noticed a small animated dog running across it. At the time, seeing animation on a computer was unusual enough that I asked what it was.

He explained that it was called Fetch. Fetch was an FTP client — File Transfer Protocol — and he explained that it was being used to transfer files over something called the Internet.

At that moment I thought I was discovering the Internet, although what I was really discovering was one small part of what would become the World Wide Web. The distinction wasn’t obvious at the time. To many of us, the Internet and the Web were the same mysterious new thing, but everybody had been talking about it, and I hadn’t noticed.

When I had mastered the illustration packages and other departments came knocking, even my dour, pony-tailed teacher seemed impressed. but a female colleague who was used to claiming all the men’s ties at the Christmas Party didn’t get mine! Even at a conservative company like Nortel, there were rebels.

I left Nortel in early 1995, but I was curious. I discovered that Holloway Library in North London had one of the few public internet terminals available locally. I booked regular sessions on it, often finding that I was the only person in the booking diary.

The process was far from simple. There was a thick folder of instructions, and connecting involved a 14.4 kbps modem and several pages of steps. It could take around twenty minutes just to get online.

When I finally connected, the Web was a very different place from what we know today. Most pages were simply text: black letters on a white background, occasionally white text on black. Images were rare.

Then I discovered websites that contained actual pictures.

One of the first memorable examples was Caltech, where I found crude colour bitmap images showing things like tidal charts and photographs of the coastline. I also visited NASA, which seemed like the obvious destination for someone fascinated by technology and space. Seeing those first images appear over a slow modem connection was astonishing. They were technically unimpressive by modern standards, but at the time they felt like a glimpse of the future.

That was when I decided I needed to learn how this new medium actually worked.

Part 2

You can always find a full index of all the articles on the page under About me in the main menu.