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.
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