Creating web pages 20 years ago

I vaguely remember the Web 20 years ago and the process of creating web pages on GeoCities. It wasn’t nearly as easy or as good looking as today’s Web but it was an exciting time back then. Matt Haughey wrote a great retrospective on Medium titled “20 Years Ago Today” about his introduction to the early Web that is a fun read if you remember what it was like back then.

20 Years Ago Today

This really brings back memories:

It was Christmas Eve, 1995, and while the store was busy, I scoured the shelves and eventually got my choices down to two books on publishing HTML. One was about writing HTML in Microsoft Word and even then I could tell it sounded like a bad idea. Instead, I grabbed Creating Your Own Netscape Pages by Andy Shafran, which covered all aspects of HTML in plain simple text and the only helper apps mentioned were a text editor called Hotdog and an image editor called Paint Shop Pro. I bought the book.

Some things don’t change. It is still a bad idea creating web pages in MS Word!

I still get a thrill when I see the old Netscape logo. I can remember how cool it was to see the new, animated Netscape logo when I updated the browser (I was never really an Internet Explorer person). I was also an early adopter of the, then, new Firefox browser and obtained permission from my firm’s IT department to install the new browser on my work laptop.

Thanks to Om Malik for the link.

Image credit: My Old Navigator – Netscape Navigator Version 1.11 by Toshihiro Oimatsu, licensed CC BY 2.0