Although I don’t know the exact date, I realized tonight that it was around Christmas time of 1994 that I wrote my first line of HTML. I was 18 at the time, and I used Netscape 1.1N to view my first personal web page, which I created in SimpleText on Macintosh System 7.
10 years later, I’m a web professional, and I’ve litteraly spent my entire adult life working on the web. I’ve maintained a personal site the entire time (I got the jeffcroft.com domain name in 1998 — at which time I transitioned my personal site into a blog).
10 years designing web pages. Not a whole lot of people can say that. I think that’s pretty damn cool.
001 // kartooner // 12.03.2004 // 7:50 AM
That’s great news, Jeff. Congrats! Likewise, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life on the web and here’s to many more years — I refuse to burn out for the reason that I’m too anxious to see what the future holds.
002 // Wilson // 12.03.2004 // 8:37 AM
I think 1993 was about the time I borrowed a 1200 baud modem from my friend at school, carted my (enormous) Mac II down to the basement where there was an open phone port and signed on to the local Apple reseller’s FirstClass server. By 1994 I’d moved up to AOL and then to a “real” ISP where I logged on with zTerm to a terminal connection and discovered the Internet through a text terminal. At first I thought that’s all there was, then I found Mosaic and the rest is History. I’m pretty sure I didn’t decide to start “making the Internet” until 1995 though, so I’m a little behind you Jeff.
003 // Jeff Croft // 12.03.2004 // 9:45 AM
I don’t think I can pinpoint the exact year I got “online,” but my best guess is 1989. It was just as I was starting high school, so that has to be close.
At the time, my family had an IBM PC XT (which actually belonged the Sprint, my father’s employeer). The PC XT had an external 1200 baud modem and ran MS-DOS. No Windows. Windows 3.1 had come out, but our PC was too old to handle it. We subscribed to Prodigy first, and did that for a while. Then, we moved up to AOL (DOS version was interesting to say the least). In my junior year of high school, I convinced my Dad that we needed a new computer and that a Mac was the way to go. That’s when we got the Performa 600 I created my first web page on.
I also used zTerm to connect to my first “real” ISP. It was in 1994 that my buddy Jeremiah, a much bigger geek than myself (to this day) introduced me to Netscape. I was hooked right away, wanting to know how to make pages. Jeremiah showed me the most important lesson I ever learned — how to “View Source.” And that’s pretty much how I learned HTML. :)
In fact, my first personal website came before I even had my own Internet access. I was still on AOL (which wasn’t connected to the Internet at the time). I went home, crafted an HTML page, took it via SneakerNet (that’s 3.5” floppy) to Jeremiah, who popped it into his webspace for me.
004 // Dustin // 12.03.2004 // 10:38 AM
Hey that’s cool. If I recall this right…I started somewhere around ‘98? I would have started earlier but my parents made me spend my money on renting a U-haul truck for them to move their home instead of buying a new computer before I went into college at the time.
Hey Jeff, you wouldn’t happen to still have your website ever still online would you?
We could turn this into a “first website hall of shame.”
005 // Jeff Croft // 12.03.2004 // 11:05 AM
Man, I wish I did. I wish I had all my previous designs, but I don’t.
A first website “hall of shame” is a great idea, though. With apologies to Cameron Moll, it could be called “Early Grab Confab.”
Interestingly, my first website was probably about as structrually and semanticly sound as any I’ve ever created. That was in the days before HTML was being absued as a presentation language. At that time, there really was no presentation on the web. It was just data.Shortly thereafter, of course, I followed the masses into tab soup, font tags, and other bastardized code.
Interesting how things come full circle.
006 // Zelnox // 12.03.2004 // 12:04 PM
(^.) (^0^)/ (/.^)/
007 // Jennifer Grucza // 12.03.2004 // 12:51 PM
Cool - I think I had around the same timeline as you. :) Made my own little website my freshman year of college (‘94-‘95) using Mosaic (written in emacs) on our college’s Unix system. Though there were a few years after graduation that I didn’t have any web presence before starting my blog this year. I’ve done pretty well with the technical side of things in these years, it’s just too bad I don’t have your design skills. :)
008 // Chris Vincent // 12.03.2004 // 12:59 PM
I love the way web design is such a young profession… Things have changed so much during its relatively short life.
009 // Vinnie Garcia // 12.03.2004 // 3:48 PM
Man I feel like such a noob. I started in ‘97 :(
Congrats on 10 years. Hopefully the web will be around for you to make 20 and beyond.
010 // Jon Hicks // 12.06.2004 // 3:57 AM
Oops, that makes me feel like a very late starter. I wasn’t online until 2000.
Wow, System 7! That takes me back!
011 // Bryan Peters // 12.06.2004 // 8:52 AM
Has it been 10 years already? I remember the first time I used Mosaic - I thought it was a fancy gimmick. Linking photos and text in a “web browser”? How dumb is that! FTP and Telnet are soooooooo much better…
012 // Jeremie Mayer // 12.14.2004 // 4:12 PM
First of all, congrats Jeff on 10 years!
I believe the first time I touched a computer was in 1993. I must of been 4 at the time and was using a good old Commoder 64! I touched the Internet the next year and started programming at 8 years old. Oooh, the advantages of having a Tech Head dad.