It’s 1997 and you want to build a website

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/its-1997-and-you-want-to-build-a-website/

by Brajeshwar • 4 years ago

107 145 4 years ago

thehistoryoftheweb.com

jaimex2• 4 years ago

You load up Frontpage or if its late in 1997, Dreamweaver.

kaffeeringe2• 4 years ago

Dreamweaver!

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

I'm surprised, DW was that early. I wrote by hand from about '96 using pico on a Sun system. I remember discovering frames and SSI in about '97.

kaffeeringe2• 4 years ago

I learned HTML by looking at other people's code. It's a wonder thatvthis feature is still standard in most browsers.

That also made me a firm believer in open-source.

grouphoot• 4 years ago

Came here to say the same thing. I learned by looking at the source of every other website, before there was minimization, obfuscation, or anything else preventing one from seeing the entirety of the sites code. A few books and websites definitely helped as well.

drewzero12• 4 years ago

I used to hit "save as HTML" in IE because I didn't know how favorites worked, and I was afraid of messing up my dad's computer. When I found out that the HTML files could be opened in Notepad, the curtain had been pulled back revealing the secret inner workings, and I was hooked.

My middle school computer club was basically a book group for raw HTML files. We started messing around to see what we could get it to do, but it was mostly feeling around in the dark. I didn't learn about documentation until getting into QBASIC a few years later.

keithnz• 4 years ago

wasn't that hard, I used paint shop pro and a text editor and also made Java applets to make things "cool" :)

pavlov• 4 years ago

I started learning HTML in 1995 and first wrote it professionally in 1997. (I was sixteen and got to design a mid-size software company's intranet on my first summer job in the business. It was easy to get into the industry then with any modest web skills.)

This article is missing two important ways to learn HTML back in the day:

1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS. Everything was right there in one file. If you saw a site you liked, just take a copy of the source and tweak it locally to understand how it works.

2) GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.

Here's a live example of a 1995 website: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/

Look at the source. It's easy to understand the basics of HTML just by comparing the source and output. Deeply nested divs and tables were not a thing yet.

Nursie• 4 years ago

The old Netscape Communicator/Mozilla suite from back then had some sort of build in website designer too, didn't it?

Yeah here we are, Netscape Composer, released in 1997 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

I think I built my first web page with that... LOL. Long time ago now :)

easrng2• 4 years ago

SeaMonkey still includes Composer IIRC

weinzierl• 4 years ago

Came here to say that. Most people in my circle were starting like that, playing around in Netscape, finding Composer and be like: Wow, I can make web pages myself.

Soon the even bigger revelation came: It's all just plain text!

Also: I don't remember anyone using books. The web was much smaller back than, but if it has had anything in abundance it was resources for learning how to make websites.

na85• 4 years ago

Read the source.

An artifact of its time. If the Web was designed today it would certainly not have viewable source.

M4v3R3• 4 years ago

Here's a live example of a 1995 website: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/

Almost 30 years have passed and this website still works and renders perfectly in modern browsers! Will we be able to say the same about current websites 20 years from now?

cypress66• 4 years ago

I would asume yes? Is there any html/css/js feature that you think would be either deleted or changed in a breaking way?

Maybe some browser specific features but only very few websites use those.

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

Looks good (or is it just nostalgia?):

- familiar font on grey background is quite readable

- blue underlined link tell you what to click on

- link turning violet to indicate you've visited it already? Genius!

tragomaskhalos• 4 years ago

The first websites I remember - this would have been around '93 I think - were the Smithsonian one that showed gemstones, and the original IMDB that was still then hosted at the University of Cardiff in Wales.

Isn't it funny how these early sites managed to be completely functional and useful in their plain and unpretentious way without pulling down gigabytes of cruft designed primarily to make it look like you aren't looking at a website. Given the choice between the 2022 and 1993 presentations of IMDB, I'd take the earlier one in a heartbeat.

TrackerFF2• 4 years ago

As an counter example - Last year I dug up my old PC from around 2000, which had not been booted up since 2006 or so. I think I had 512 megs of ram on than one.

Fired up opera, which still had cached websites in the tabs - most of them long gone. Funny to see 2006-era Facebook in the flesh.

Tried to fire up a some news websites, and ended up with BSOD rather quickly. Chewed right through the paltry memory.

edit: I guess it is possible to browse some modern websites by disabling javascript, media downloads, and what not. But it's probably going to be a limited experience as far as functionality goes.

dwd3• 4 years ago

The early websites were RWD out of the box.

I personally think it could be getting better (at least in the realm of Government websites)

The UK Gov Design System for example:

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Clean, accessible and functional first.

matsemann4• 4 years ago

1) Read the source.

That's why I included right-click-protection scripts on all my pages! Couldn't have my friends steal my cool gifs (that I'd shamelessly stolen somewhere else) or copy my cool menu hover effect or whatever!

Of course all this was futile, but we weren't knowledgeable enough to know better, heh. At some point, I also had a script that would "encrypt" my HTML. Looking back, it was just base64 encoding the source, and then through JS converting that string to html and inserting into the body dom element.

pmontra• 4 years ago

In the early days

  telnet your.host.domain 80

  GET / HTTP/1.0

and copy and paste from the scrollback buffer of the terminal. Chances were that the code was handcrafted and easily readable.

That would work unless you were in the vast unlucky majority with Windows and no telnet or no access to a Linux / Unix server.

Anyway, I did it plenty of times. Then wget and curl.

dwd3• 4 years ago

Reading the OP I was pretty sure the author wasn't building websites in 1997.

Not mentioning the GUI tools was a pretty poor omission: Frontpage was everywhere back then. I personally hand-coded but had to use it in my first professional role in '98.

Even the books were wrong. I had (it might still be in a box at my parents) a 1st Ed. copy of HTML: The Definitive Guide, later followed by other O'Reilly books: CSS Def. Guide and one I wore to death as it was the MDN of the day: the DHTML Def. Guide.

That site is awesome; I had to look and yep, allcaps!

Brometheus2• 4 years ago

Frontpage Express was getting so slow when you edited large tables... what a time to be alive.

HeckFeck• 4 years ago

Ah yes, Frontpage Express. That was how I built my first website, which still exists: http://cm.thran.uk/archive/really4theweb/ (feat. <BODY BGSOUND="something.mid"> for those of you who still rock IE). There are also some embedded java applets fumbling in the dark for the JRE plugin that was hoisted by a long deprecated API.

Also I once found this humble getting started guide for FPE, miraculously still online with screenshots: http://www.iwaynet.net/support/Web/FrontPage/fpe_create.html

SteveMoody73• 4 years ago

I think I designed my first website using HoTMetaL. The WYSIWYG interface was basic but worked but once you hit the limitations of it then at least you could edit the HTML directly.

ubermonkey2• 4 years ago

Those GUI tools spat out AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL HTML.

hateful• 4 years ago

Yes they did! But if you were learning - you could drag and drop and then see what tags were created. And when you realized that what it was creating was awful, that meant that you finally understood HTML!

meowzero• 4 years ago

I also taught myself HTML around 95 or 96. I think I even used one of the books the OP mentioned and used Notepad to write my source.

I knew one dude who ran a local ISP and connected to it using a 14.4 baud modem (he might have ran the isp through his house). He also had a small web server where I can host my website.

I had all sorts of fancy stuff like marquees and blinking tags. I think I even used a table to lay out certain graphics and text. Those were good times.

kalleboo• 4 years ago

I was a big fan of the Mac semi-WYSIWYG tool PageSpinner, which would show you the raw source but style the tags more subtly, style the text accordingly (size and bold/italic), and had wizards to insert whatever tag you needed and resolve the relative hierarchical image paths required https://i.imgur.com/QIrXhyj.jpg

foobarbecue• 4 years ago

1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS.

Yes, but also in the following years, js and css were simple too. I learned js and css (well html as well I guess, but that took like... a day) initally by reading website source, before minification and obfuscation, webpack, SASS, etc.

It's a beautiful thing to use a web application where all the internals are visible and tweakable. These days I try to develop with as little obfuscation as possible, but it sure is going against the grain. See https://dev.to/open-wc/developing-without-a-build-1-introduc... and Snowpack.

throw8383833jj• 4 years ago

Ahh. the good old days.

incanus77• 4 years ago

Read the source.

Yes! This was the big one. I got to college in late ‘95 and almost immediately someone in my dorm showed me how to both code HTML tags and look at page source in Netscape. That began an iterative feedback loop of learning how to make things based on what I saw already out there — and looking at personal home pages (at my school or not) was a great creative playground. By ‘97 I was hand-coding pages for small businesses in the school incubator, several departments, and my own page. I don’t remember getting a hold of many books for a couple more years. And the only GUI tool I remember in use around then was FrontPage, but it spit out so much redundant code and I never took to it.

garrickvanburen• 4 years ago

yep. I also started writing HTML professionally in 1997. Me and Notepad and FTP. Toughest part was making sure updates cascaded across all the pages.

Webmonkey & Castro's book = everything you need.

Syzygies• 4 years ago

Yep. In 1995 the main lesson of the web seemed to be "you can be an author." (Good luck finding bus schedules...) So I cobbled together a Pavoni espresso website in raw HTML, most of my efforts going into the drawings, and for a time it was most of the traffic on our department web server:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/coffee/

One wondered then as much as ever about things one read on the web. For example, Kopi Luwak was a legendary coffee fished out of paradoxurus marsupial feces. All references on the web could be traced to a single source, yet apparently this is true.

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.

This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.

Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.

It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!

throwaway787544• 4 years ago

You find a free (or dirt cheap) CGI-BIN web hoster and FTP your programs there. Files for your message board or site counter are saved in the /CGI-BIN/ directory too. You upload new files to run arbitrary commands and use those commands to walk around the system that you otherwise have no access to. You discover another customer on the same shared host who is selling real estate in Alabama. You consider it strange that all the users have the same group ID, and so can access each other's files. Later on you learn about suEXEC and get some cash to help somebody configure their web server. Two decades later you're doing basically the same job and wonder why it feels so much more difficult now.

dwd3• 4 years ago

I hosted my first website with CSoft back in the last 90s after getting kicked off the student server at Uni for hogging too many resources. Had a C executable dropped in cgi-bin doing all the heavy lifting.

Major deja-vu 20 years later throwing a Golang executable up on a server; really felt like I was back where I started.

seydor• 4 years ago

Didn't you have dreamweaver or frontpage to do that? And Flash if you wanna show off?

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Or Hot Dog Studio if you wanted something closer to the code.

themodelplumber• 4 years ago

I really liked using Corel Photo Paint for some early projects in the late '90s. Back when it felt like a black background and 3D textured buttons was a nearly cinematic experience. (Image maps in general were so easy to work with, and I still wonder if they couldn't have been adapted to the modern web with a bit more sensitivity or nostalgia)

Ten years later I reluctantly taught my Photoshop and Illustrator students how to use the built-in web export tools and was legitimately shocked by what they created. They totally got alt text and titles and things, too.

So, lesson learned; now there are some projects for which I really lean into the $app's built-in web export tools. Usually fast, easy, and appropriate to the project, rather than whatever happens when the output is compared against the entire web...

_the_inflator• 4 years ago

Extremely popular and helpful in Germany was selfHTML, which started to document the web in 1995: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfhtml

I also used Netscape's HTML tool, played around with HotMetalPro. Here is a link that somewhat is a reference to 1997: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/html_en/kap_2/backbon...

alex_suzuki• 4 years ago

Wow, this brings back so many memories, thank you. selfHTML was like an early version of MDN, without the authority but same general usefulness.

BlackLotus893• 4 years ago

I still have a hard copy of it :D My father printed it out back then. Good times.

Edit correction. Can't find the printout. Maybe it's still at home? I still got my basic and turbo pascal binder and some weird shit I can't quite remember.

jraph• 4 years ago

Extremely popular and helpful in Germany was selfHTML

It also had a French version. I remember it as being a very good resource.

dpcan• 4 years ago

I still learn to code from books. Something about reading the code, retyping it, looking at it on the page. It gets glued into my mind in a way that I can actually retain and recall it.

You learn NOTHING from copy pasting stackoverflow. I always look and retype or actually figure out what’s happening. Otherwise I won’t be able to solve problems, just put bandaids on them.

BrandoElFollito• 4 years ago

I sometimes copy/paste from SO, especially with new languages. If it works (which is not always the case), it is a great opportunity to learn something on a real example tailored to your needs that you understand.

BlackLotus893• 4 years ago

Pff nothing about dreamweaver. It was (afair) never good, but it was there. There was another tool I forgot the name of, but even this nieche was filled back then.

ahofmann• 4 years ago

Dreamweaver was great! It was the only wysiwyg editor, that didn't mangled your html code. And it had some kind of templating feature, which enabled me to build an entire website around hundreds, maybe thousand's of pictures.

Rodeoclash• 4 years ago

Maybe Hotdog?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotDog

BlackLotus893• 4 years ago

Wasn't hotdog. I just skimmed through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors but couldn't find it.

Maybe it was some Microsoft tool. But since back then I mainly used notepad to edit my html it's not really that important :) it's only too bad that none of my websites survived (never hosted anything of importance back then).

aceazzameen• 4 years ago

Oh my. I had forgotten about Hotdog and the various other editors I had tried back then.

mg• 4 years ago

I think that was the year my internet career started. It began when one evening I was hanging out in an internet cafe. At some point, someone said "Oh there comes the guy who owns the company that provides us with internet access". I was so excited that I jumped at that guy and started bombarding him with questions. About how this whole magic internet thing works. My enthusiasm seemed to be contagious and after a while he said "You know what, I'll give you an ssh account on our server. Then you can build your own website on our server under /~mg.

I was mesmerized. I knew absolutely nothing about ssh, http, html etc. But I knew I had to spend the night figuring it out. And have a website up and running the next morning.

So I ran home and started reading and trying things out. As I couldn't really see much use in all that html gibberish, I just used full size images for every page and interlinked them via the <map> element. Hurray! Next morning my website was online! Mostly built by just using Photoshop :)

I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.

M4v3R3• 4 years ago

Don't you love it how these were the times when you approached someone you didn't even know and he gave you SSH access to his server, just like that? That's also my experience from that era - somehow people trusted each other more back then and I also got access to one company's server just from hanging on their IRC channel and trying to be helpful.

bestouff• 4 years ago

Exactly. I had an open (read/write) ftp server in beginning of the nineties. It was nice, people could put files in there, retrieve what they wanted.

By the middle of the nineties I had to write-protect everything and leave only an "incoming" directory with write access, because some jerk deleted everything just for fun.

By the end of the nineties I was fed up with everyone trying to use my "incoming" directory for storing warez/pr0n so I gave up (yes I tried setting it write-only but what's the point ?). Well, it was fine while it lasted, the community of people on the internet definitely changed in a few years, and it didn't get any better in the following decades.

doublerabbit• 4 years ago

Mine to. I use to use those hacking challenge websites ngsec, try2hack.nl and then ended up with talking to a Dutch guy who set me up a old box out of generosity hosted on his home net somewhere in NL.

bradwood2• 4 years ago

Was SSH even a thing then? Or was it still telnet in those days?

httpsterio• 4 years ago

ssh was created in 1995 by a Finnish university researcher at the University of Helsinki, his name is Tatu Ylönen :)

Likewise, IRC was also created by a fellow finn back in 1988, Jarkko "Wiz" Oikarinen, at the University of Oulu.

kadoban2• 4 years ago

In 1997, SSH was relatively new, a couple years old (looked it up).

It did spread very quickly, as the issue it solves was quite obvious and there weren't a lot of competing solutions. So it's pretty possible that that was the actual tech used.

midasuni2• 4 years ago

In the late 90s I used telnet to a unit machine of some sort to manage my websites. In 2000 I went to uni and we were told to use rlogin!

kevstev• 4 years ago

In my experience, it wasn't until 2003ish that telnet really started getting replaced by SSH, with telnet access being routinely shut down. My memory is really more around dev environments, prod envs may have been a lot more locked down.

darkwater• 4 years ago

ssh in 1997 was pretty advanced! I think they were the days when people started the campaign against telnet and rcp in favor of ssh.

patrck• 4 years ago

Yeah, the Mitnick hack of Shimomura (rsh + predictable TCP seq #s) was already out there due to that incident's publicity.

How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?

matsemann4• 4 years ago

For me it was a teacher showing his basic web page at the school's computer lab. I wanted to do the same! He showed me how to edit the source in Notepad, and watch the result in IE. To get me started, he gave me a floppy disk with a single index.html file with some tags. I played around with that for ages.

To actually host the page, ~10 old me didn't know what to do. But a relative in Denmark had suddenly become the "webmaster" for her local government, and gotten to learn some stuff.

Remotely teaching me ftp or ssh was out of the question, but I got tipped about Tripod/Lycos. They had an online interface where I could upload a file! And then later she showed me how to apply for dot.tk and have my very own domain. Very cool 8)

Was a bit dormant, though. What more could I do than adding some texts and under construction gifs?

Then the Harry Potter craze hit. Lots of people made cool websites, and I wanted to join! To up the game, me and a friend made stuff in FrontPage. Still manually uploading one and one file through Tripod's web interface. I could do so much more than the little HTML I had managed to do in Notepad! Then I later got to spend a day shadowing a professional web developer, and she gave me the CD for the previous version of Dreamweaver! First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.

As many others, my Harry Potter page was a "school" where people could do stuff and earn house points. But not knowing programming, everything was static and I had to manually edit and reupload files. Luckily only like two friends used the page hehe. But other HP pages were dynamic! How? I had to learn PHP!

As an aside, it's curious how many of those professionals I interacted with the first years were women. Companies/govagencies felt they needed a presence, but didn't care much, and just gave the task to someone else already doing communication/admin work. And they learned on the job and suddenly became the first experts here.

KronisLV• 4 years ago

First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.

I think this is more or less an argument in favor of tools that are helpful to the developer, like feature rich IDEs with parameter hints and autocomplete/suggestions, text editors with plugins that give you a similar experience or even a little bit of AI help.

Some people have the attitude that you might want to learn a language/framework with just a text editor to know the internals, but I think that if you want results fast and focus on solving problems (getting the site up and running) quickly, then tools like these are invaluable!

dotancohen5• 4 years ago

  > I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it
  > is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.

Good thing you had no hard dependency on <blink>!

account42• 4 years ago

Nothing a little CSS can't fix:

  blink {
   text-decoration: blink;
   animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
   -webkit-animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
  }
  @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }
  @-webkit-keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }

hncommenter13• 4 years ago

I worked for an ecommerce startup in 1998/1999 that was founded in 1997. The app was built in Perl with (by 1999) a MySQL backend.

But there were definitely applications for building larger websites, including ColdFusion[1] from Allaire and, infamously, Broadvision[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadvision

bradwood2• 4 years ago

I remember both of these, especially BroadVision which was the biggest most overpriced piece of shit we ever worked with. We used to call it FraudVision

jhoechtl• 4 years ago

Wasn't Dreamweaver a thing back then? People could create web sites without any knowledge.

Also Netscape Navigator had an option to create HTML sites.

hnbad2• 4 years ago

Dreamweaver was infamously terrible until the Web Standards Project aggressively nudged the development team towards producing standards compliant HTML instead of the obtuse and verbose tag soup it generated up to that point. I think that only happened in the early 2000s.

Not as bad as Frontpage, mind you. At least initially.

yCloser• 4 years ago

Step 1: go to a Warez site and look for dreamweaver

dopeboy• 4 years ago

Step 2: patiently download all the rar files

Step 3: pray there’s no crc errors after hours of downloading

carrozo• 4 years ago

In 1997, at the age of 13, having access to Microsoft Frontpage Express was pure magic. Wish I still had those first creations.

antman• 4 years ago

It's 2022 and you want to give a kid a book on how to build a site. Which book might that be?

kadoban2• 4 years ago

The kid already knows how to do Facebook or whatever horrible place, they won't care.

Give them a book on programming instead, much more likely to be useful and appreciated.

easrng2• 4 years ago

kids aren't on Facebook lmao

TikTok sure, insta sure, not Facebook. Carrd is popular for making websites among Twitter users, but that may not be relevant depending on how you define kid.

sodaplayer• 4 years ago

When people ask me how I learned web, I'm usually at a loss remembering what path I took. I often say it was some Dreamweaver and osmosis through reading a lot of A List Apart and Smashing Magazine after being introduced to those websites by my friend, but now seeing the cover the books in this article brought up memories of me being preteen in the mid-2000s finding "HTML for the World Wide Web" on my dad's bookshelf and meticulously going through it.

jeanchen• 4 years ago

For somebody surfing the web in 1997, a book might feel a bit… 20th century.

Hard disagree on this...

But to the point, back then web pages were simple enough for it to be trivial to learn by viewing the source, especially if you already had experience with code. You didn't even have to be studying or working in CS specifically, BASIC and Logo were taught in many grade schools.

davedx• 4 years ago

Where’s the “by reading code in ‘view source’ and teaching yourself html”?

Dave3of5• 4 years ago

I thought this would be about tech but it was basically just you had to read books in 1997 rather than copy paste stack overflow.

moss2• 4 years ago

It's too bad they didn't have Kubernetes and React back then. How did they even survive?

yrgulation• 4 years ago

Or without agiling themselves to death. How they even function as teams without a scrum master??

buescher2• 4 years ago

SCRUM was around in the nineties but it wasn't a big fad yet. The big fad of the late nineties was EXTREME PROGRAMMING, which is still around as part of AGILE.

mschuster91• 4 years ago

Copying files by hand with FTP and constantly being annoyed by using the wrong FTP transfer mode leading to corrupted binary files.

This entire thread brings back a lot of memories.

TrackerFF2• 4 years ago

Biggest hurdle was purchasing a PC.

Back in 1995, we paid equivalent of almost $4000 for a PC with 133 MHz Pentium processor - don't remember the RAM or HDD, but it came with Windows 95. Since we lived somewhat rural back then, libraries were woefully outdated on the computer/IT department - both as far as books and actual PCs go.

The one bookstore we had, didn't really carry much of those things either. Most of my learning came through various PC magazine tutorials, and ordering books via said magazines. Or more realistically - trying to find out what other people worked or dabbled with IT in my little town, and trying to learn through them. Everything was very, very DIY and bootstrapped.

And just for the sake of nostalgia - one of the local PC-enthusiasts had parents that worked at the municipality, and managed to argue that we (the local PC "community") needed a space of our own. So we got this run-down part of an older school building, rent-free, for maybe 7 years.

As long as we paid the utility for that part, and any internet connection, we could pretty much do as pleased. You had probably a dozen or so guys pretty much living there, playing various game over LAN. Doom, Quake, Age of empires, and what not.

Another part of guys were mostly tinkering with websites, software, or what not. Still vividly remember all the Borland boxes laying around. And of course, the more free spirited guys "Buy what? No, let me show you our warez".

But you know what - we made money, real and good money, from just churning out websites. There were really no beauty standards, little (to no) functionality, and hosting was usually done via some local dude that run a bunch of servers out of his shop.

Archelaos2• 4 years ago

Biggest hurdle was purchasing a PC.

A PC was actually not necessary getting started. I wrote my first Web-site (called "homepage" in those days) in 1994 on my Atari ST I had purchased in 1989. I uploaded it via FTP to my university Web space and checked it via telnetting to the text-based browser Lynx[1] on the university's remote host. Later I used Lynx directly on my Atari ST. This was all done via a 1,200 baud modem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

capableweb• 4 years ago

I don't think parent necessarily meant "PC" like that, but rather than you needed to buy a pricey device to get into the space.

For example, the Atari ST launched at June 1985 for the price of $800. Adjusted to today's prices (via https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), that would be ~$2200, which is a lot for most people.

So I think the point still stands. The barrier to entry was acquiring the device in order to be able to do anything related to it.

em-bee3• 4 years ago

sounds like a hackerspace

Jistern• 4 years ago

It’s 1997 and you want to build a website...

... just wait a decade or two; it will get much easier.

Seriously, I built a very simply static website around 1997 or 1998 with Adobe Page Mill. It was pretty easy.

rollcat• 4 years ago

I first learned making websites from Philip Greenspun's 1997 book (dead trees back then; available online now[0]). It was already a couple years after the original release (and I was a kid), but it's amazing how much of his opinions or advice (at least, as I remember it) still holds 25 years later: own your personal domain name, dangers of cookie tracking, structured approach to development and maintenance.

He did make some mis-predictions (Linux turned out pretty good in the end), but I will probably re-read it some time soon, and I expect it to have aged well.

[0] http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

grose• 4 years ago

Probably closer to 1999 but my first foray into web programming was Neopets. You could upload some HTML for your virtual pet and they'd host it for you. Spent ages making fancy animated text gifs from random tutorials only to realize that my friends couldn't see images that I had hotlinked to "C:\My Documents\awesome.gif". That brought me on a quest to find external hosting which led me to Spaceports.com and then IRC, mIRC scripting and then PHP... and now it's my livelihood. I just wanted to thank Neopets for giving kids the chance to program something and a non-scammy place to host it. I imagine I'm not the only one whose career was kickstarted by a virtual pet.

I remember using this site primarily to learn about HTML: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224220115/http://www.htmlgo...

ciupicri• 4 years ago

Or just use Microsoft Word and Save as HTML. There's also Microsoft Frontpage [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

midasuni2• 4 years ago

In 1997 I’m fairly sure frontpage was out. I believe I used HoTMetaL 5 at that time. They bundle front page is as “use a service” which is odd

Interaction - mainly scripts - were provided by matts script archive.

mpalfrey• 4 years ago

Was around then that I got started.

Static sites, created using Frontpage Express (later, full fat Frontpage, then later again Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Fireworks). Blink, Marquee etc tags being used etc. Got to have a visitor counter and guest book too.

I remember creating sites for various things, hosted on a whole load of different places over the years (.tk brought back memories). I also remember figuring out that I had to upload images and why my image links wouldn't work.

Fun times.

bborud• 4 years ago

Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML, the university printed them and placed boxes of the booklets in the lobby of half a dozen of the main buildings so people could just grab them. And I think about half the student body did.

A couple of weeks later I was hitching a ride with someone and we started talking about what we do. He said that "I'm teaching people this new thing called HTML". Then he reached back into the back seat and pulled out a booklet. He had a whole box of them. Apparently he had just taken a whole box of them from the university and was using this as his course material.

I never told him I wrote it. Actually, I was a bit proud that someone could make a living using teaching materials I'd written and I didn't want to embarrass him. (And since the university had printed boxes of them it wasn't like there was any shortage. My main mission was to get people to use WWW so I didn't mind).

I'd probably cringe if I read it today :-).

(However the thing I'm most proud of from that period was to ensure that policies on student access to publishing materials on their homepages without needing to get the content explicitly approved were adopted across norwegian universities. There was a meeting between the universities to figure out what policies to adopt. I didn't have any real authority, but I managed to convince everyone that what students put on their homepages is none of our business as long as they don't break the law or hurt themselves or someone else.

During that period I also learned that one of the most efficient ways to kill bad policies is to follow them to the letter and generate so much work for other people they need to rethink the policies. :-))

a1o• 4 years ago

It's missing using Dreamweaver or Frontpage

drewzero12• 4 years ago

I don't remember what year it came out, but I had a lot of fun designing pages in Netscape Composer and flipping between preview and code to see what the generated code looked like.

readingnews• 4 years ago

1997, by then I had helped start two ISPs, one of them used to be a huge BBS. Building a website was not really the problem, tools were up and coming, it seemed like everyone could build a website with a plain text editor, and a lot of people knew HTML.

The biggest challenge (if you did not work at the ISP) was keeping it on 24x7, and registering your DNS. It sure seems like DNS is a lot easier now than before. You had to call NetSol, and there was a multi-step fax-back and forth process to prove who you were to register your DNS. Sometimes it took days. You needed an act of congress to change things afterwards too, and be sure you did not mess up your NS server information. As for keeping it on 24x7, I think our pipes now are better than ever. T1 down? Yes, why yes it is, there is something wrong with the frame relay again. Or someone at the telco changed my dlci. Or the crazy person with the backhoe cut it. Or the router decided to freak for no reason. Or our custom X.25 connector went bad or lost a solder connection.

Good times... :)

james-skemp• 4 years ago

AOL member pages hosted my first site, around this time (maybe a little earlier?). I recall a friend, Patrick, being the person who put the bug in my brain about making my own website. Later I'd find out my aunt did some web work, or at least had a membership in W3C or some related org.

HTML Goodies (and the DHTML/JS sister site, I forget the branding), also mentioned, was a great next step to expand my knowledge.

But initially AOL actually had some good HTML learning resources. All caps for the tags. I opted for black backgrounds and white or blue text ... :) Developed in Notepad initially.

Somewhere I think I still have printed off copies of some of those old resources I printed so I could look at them offline.

drooopy• 4 years ago

I learned HTML by creating very basic, random stuff in Netscape Composer and then studying the HTML that it was generating.

coldcode• 4 years ago

I went to work for a company that built web apps in 1997, we used WebObjects/EnterpriseObjects (NeXT still at the time) which I still remember fondly as being head and shoulders better than anything else people were using at the time. But Javascript was a horror show, I worked on a web app for the USPS that was required to use IE 2 (!) because they had paid for a site license and they damned well were going to use it, even though Netscape was better at the time.

It was fun work in that everything was so new, it was almost an entirely new industry. Today many people claim to know how to do everything (even though that's pretty foolish), but then you were learning on the fly. When I started at the beginning of the personal computer era (80's) it was a similar kind of wild experimentation era.

hnrodey• 4 years ago

I spent countless hours on a website (I believe) was called htmlgoodies.com - all of his posts were in the style of "So You Want a X, Huh?" Boy, I loved this site. All the feels!

If Joe Burns, PhD reads this then THANK YOU! You had a profound impact on the 14-17 year old me.

Wayback Machine link for those interested: https://web.archive.org/web/19970529013015/http://htmlgoodie...

I suppose I was lucky to be a teenager in the mid-90's with access to a computer with dial up internet. Untold hours using the View Source option in the browser and then trying to make my own stuff using Notepad (Windows). Hundreds of lines of black/white HTML snuffing out syntax errors. Trying to make images used bootleg versions of Photoshop. I recall when I started to see Javascript get popular in webpages and just being blown away people could write that stuff on their own.

Time flies.

em-bee3• 4 years ago

my start was in 1994 at university where a sysadmin had offered an extracurricular class to figure out this new http and html thing.

i was among the first in the class to run an http server by my self including cgi and server side includes in perl (setting up a server wasn't part of the class) which earned me a job as assistant sysadmin.

then i got invitet by a classmate to a student club to help them build their website, which i did using spinner/roxen which did serverside includes on steroids by making it look and feel like html itself.

that allowed me to create fancy dynamic websites with generated graphics among other things

Tepix• 4 years ago

Microsoft Frontpage (released in 1995) is mentioned only in passing. It was frowned upon by people in the know, but i suppose it got the job done for newbies.

One of the biggest changes is that "view source" is no longer helpful to learn HTML from scratch.

andrew_• 4 years ago

I learned via the htmlgoodies website, and iirc that was late 1996. Printed pages of things I wanted to remember, and put them in a red binder that I still have to this day.

cityzen• 4 years ago

I learned html by printing out website source code on a dot matrix printer. I mentioned this in a meeting with a client and half the people were like, “What is a dot matrix printer?”. Good times!

slowhand09• 4 years ago

Back up to 1994... We were supposed to be developing for x-windows. WTF... NCSA Mosaic browser... We're on it. Two months later you could query our Sybase database via an HTML form. Another 3 weeks, you could query our Oracle database with a different form. A year or so later you could download a package to do database interfaces. Soon you could buy one.

Soon after, we used to print the entire catalog of registered domain names, just to see what was taken.

FerretFred• 4 years ago

by 1997, there were other options available

Yup. Download a web site you liked the look of, see how they did it and build your own based on that ;)

ubermonkey2• 4 years ago

I built my first one in 1995, so yeah, it was very much teach-yourself, but the good news was that, back then, view-source would give you everything you needed to know about how any given page worked, so you could learn a LOT by finding sites you liked and figuring out how they worked.

By 1997, I was working in a consultancy doing custom sites and early Internet-style applications, which was back then insanely lucrative. Like, we pitched $moviecompany a web site for $1,000,000, and got the deal (it involved DB integration and more active behavior, etc, all of which was novel at the time).

buro92• 4 years ago

I dug a website out of an old archive last week. I needed it as a documentary maker has been in touch and some of their questions are answered by just looking at this website from the mid-late 1990s.

It still works. All I used at the time were server side includes and a bit of PERL that was in a /cgi-bin/ . Sure there are some dead links (to some real media files hosted by a third party long-since defunkt) but mostly it just works as SSI is still supported in most web servers and fastCGI exists.

I'm installing it on a laptop tomorrow morning to show the documentary maker. Interestingly they were interviewing me about one thing, but the site shows another thing... that we were one of the first music acts to allow the full download of an album online. This was in early 1998 when we put the entire catalogue online as media files to listen to (first as Real Audio files, later as mp3s, before also embracing Napster and even making live concerts available for free via that).

It's good stuff, early web sites were fun and exciting.

The best feature of this website which was for a record label, is that the bands didn't know what to do with a website so instead I gave control to fans... the whole site was user-generated content as far back as 1996. Things like guitar tabs, lyrics, mishearings, stories, fan artwork... the official record label site was made by fans and just became an archive of everything that the fans and label together cared about. In 1996 this was a link on every page "email if you want to add your content"... it worked.

Minor49er• 4 years ago

Fascinating. Do you know what the documentary will be called and who's putting it out?

buro92• 4 years ago

No idea :)

I verified with the band (Belle & Sebastian) that it was legit and they wanted me to be involved, but beyond that I'll find out tomorrow.

From the prelim questions, I understand that their angle is looking at the early web and the music industry and that this is one of two they're initially researching. They're interested in Belle & Sebastian due to the 1999 Brit Award win https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_Awards_1999#Belle_&_Sebas... and how websites connected fans to bands. They're also interested in Wilco as they believed that to be the first instance of a band publishing a whole album on their website (but B&S did that before, but I thought we were late to the game so someone else must've been first). It sounded early stage though, so I figure their research will inform and help evolve their ideas.

buescher2• 4 years ago

A book you could have read in 1997, but probably didn't, was Philip Greenspun's "Database Backed Web Sites: The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing".

A4ET8a8uTh0• 4 years ago

It is interesting how much things change.

To be perfectly honest, despite some obvious drawbacks, I miss the simplicity of HTML. And I really dislike how much my every step is tracked online ( and how much it slows everything down.. my online bank when allowed to go nuts loads up for full 30 seconds in chromium; naturally it does not help that it does not want to cooperate when it is not allowed to do that ).

I guess I miss the old days.

I put up a website for a lawyer friend in EU zone recently in pure HTML ( so super simple - nothing fancy, but she did not need that much ). I did not hear any complaints, but then I sold it as a privacy consideration ( you can tell your customers you don't do any analytics, you don't pollute their device with random cookies ).

shimonabi• 4 years ago

I think that was the year I got my first dial-up Internet connection.

I used Frontpage to create my website and learned HTML by viewing the source code. I then used the command line Windows ftp to upload the web site to a 10MB server I got access to for free from the academic network of the primary school. Later I stole a bunch of MIDI-s, animated GIF-s and Javascript code from other websites.

I remember I was pulling my hair out because the images wouldn't transfer correctly. I didn't know I had to switch to binary mode.

snarfy• 4 years ago

<MARQUEE><BLINK>Welcome to 1997!</BLINK></MARQUEE>

timthorn• 4 years ago

O'Reilly's Webmaster in a Nutshell was my bible in 1997, along with the RFCs: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/webmaster-in-a/15659232...

The ORA Nutshell books were a great series for learning many technologies around the turn of the millennium.

erickhill• 4 years ago

I taught myself HTML after buying a massively thick book from Barnes and Nobles and used only Netscape Navigator 4.01, which came with something called the Netscape Composer HTML editor.

I'd just finished art school and needed to put together a portfolio website. I thought I was so clever... I made the front page contain an illustration of mine dead center on the screen of a very obese man in a jock strap. You had to click his belly to enter the site.

Anyway, that site got me a "Web designer" job at a company in Richardson, Texas, named Micografx. They were a competitor to Adobe at the time and made some pretty cool software including Picture Publisher (a very robust Windows-only photo editor). They had an entire suite of graphical tools. They also made software called Create a Card, where you could create digital postcards on your computer and email them to people.

My first job was to work on a team to convert that software from CD-ROM to 100% online. It was an incredible learning experience and launched my career into the exciting Web design world on the cusp of the dot-com boom.

I partially owe my career to Netscape Navigator 4.01, which was released in 1997.

I really miss that version of the web sometimes.

franze• 4 years ago

1997 using GeoCities edit HTML function for the first time

1998 launching the first European website of a major worldwide photography company as a projectmanager, webdesigner, contentwriter, fotographer, "developer" one man team.

was paid 120 Schilling per hour (about 9 EUR).

fun times before the invention of separation of labor on the CyberDataHighway

trelane• 4 years ago

Some of us read the W3C specs on HTML and CSS...

pinewurst• 4 years ago

AOLserver!

bitlax• 4 years ago

First site was built with Netscape Composer and hosted on Geocities and then I figured out HTML from tweaking it.

ComputerCat• 4 years ago

Lol does anybody else remember that little cat that would climb all over your open windows and desktop while working?

aimor2• 4 years ago

I remember sites used to incorporate a lot of on-theme graphics in fun (also inaccessible) ways. It sounds backwards because of limited connection speeds, but it was pretty common to have titles and navigation buttons and borders and bullet points all presented as GIFs. Back then corporate websites tried hard to look small and personal ( https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174605/http://www.cocaco... under the about page: "management wanted a place in the domain, so we decided to let them have this part" ), while today it seems everyone wants their website to look clean and professional with big splashy images ( https://www.coca-cola.com/ ). That style of unified content and presentation is gone, it's visually out of date, more effort to implement, and hard to do it the right way and have it work well for everyone. But man it looked cool, the web could use a few more cool looking sites.

epc2• 4 years ago

Well, absent graphics you couldn't really do much styling. CSS wasn't widely available until 1997 or so.

I maintained one of those corporate sites…here's a library of the IBM homepages for the five years I was the webmaster: https://epcostello.net/library/ibmcom/

aimor2• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing your writeup, I enjoyed reading that. It's nice you had printouts of the pages, old sites just don't render correctly on archive.org. I also think v6 was something special, that one really came together and has a magazine type feel. It's frustrating that the early web turned out to be so ephemeral. I was too young to think about websites not being around forever, and I have a lot of vague memories of interesting sites now lost.

mikewarot2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if I used Edwin by TurboPower Software, or Notepad... but it worked fine building my home page.[1]

It also worked well enough at work... we had a "brochure ware" type page for the first few years. It wasn't until 2000 that someone with Graphics skills took over.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19971013164938/http://www.tsrcom...

Handytinge• 4 years ago

I made a lot of money from nothing back in the day, buying cheap servers from Softlayer and the like (physicals, virtual wasn't a thing) on a monthly rental, purchasing cPanel licenses and selling shared hosting services. Primarily to Americans, the polar opposite of my time zone.

The big money maker was having Frontpage Extensions enabled on the web server - anyone serious wanted it, and few people provided it. I also wrote my own (awful PHP3 based) payment integrations, allowing automated billing. Quite often, the business ran itself.

It’s 1997 and you want to build a website

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