My First Website HTML from 1994
Created //
TL;DR // Let's go nostalgic... Here's my first website, made in 1994, which still works today. Yay for web standards!
My first step into HTML
In the summer of 1994, I was in my 4th year of University studying architecture. Our design studio focused on airports, with a secondary focus on the use of technology.
And that's why I made a website.
My cynical side would say it was an easy way to avoid the churn, effort and expense that went into most architecture presentations. The production of preparing large drawings, printing large images, making changes, and repeating that all over again wasn't exactly fun.
But really, I was already more than comfortable working in an entirely digital way. I'd been creating 3d renderings, CAD drawings, and digital illustrations for 7 or 8 years at this point. Creating a website would give me an opportunity to learn something new. (And, as someone who always liked playing with anything tech, I had no reservations.)
What did it look like?
That's actually easy to show... because I've put the entire interactive site in a frame here below:
Or, you can just visit the site directly.
Obviously it's very simplistic, but it's funny how many of the UI patterns have persisted. A navigation bar at the top of the page, a header/masthead, etc.
But if you look at the source code, you see a lot things that are definitely different from how we do things today.
For example:
- no
<!doctype>declaration - no
<head>section (because I probably hadn't learned about it)
Layout is primarily implemented via:
<table>and<center>tags for positionbgcolorattribute for background colour<font size="x">for text sizing
Other things of note:
- there's no javascript, which makes sense, because it wasn't invented until a year later
- there's no CSS, because it wouldn't be invented until a few years later
Behind the scenes
Tech context (1994)
The website was built using basic HTML -- whatever was available that I was aware of in 1994. JavaScript wouldn't be invented for another year. CSS wouldn't be invented until a few more years after that.
Given that the filenames follow the 8.3 Windows naming convention, it's likely that I built it in Windows 3.1 and copied the files over to my university account. (I can't remember anymore!) We accessed the University network via Sun workstations (probably a Sparcstation?).
Most of the images are either GIF or JPG. I also noticed a number of source files were TGA (Targa) image files. This was the common format we used at the time for rendering images from AutoDesk 3D Studio v2.
User interface and design
The website featured a simple design -- if you can call it a design. Then again, simplicity was common and expected at the time. The web wasn't really a visual medium yet. It had a graphical masthead with the project's name and participant list. The main sections were presented as a header list of links. Content consisted mainly of text and images. Some images were clickable for larger views.
Also remember that desktop computer displays were much less capable in 1994 than today. The site was designed for a desktop width of 640px. The desktop design of 25 years ago is equivalent to a mobile design of today.
The layouts were also mostly text. Not just because that's primarily what the web was then, but also that images were slow and expensive. Most people accessing the web would do it through a dialup modem, typically at a speed of 2400 bps. If they were lucky they might have a 9600 bps or 14400 bps modem. A 50kb image would take 15 seconds to download on a slower modem. Today's websites (which can average multiple mb in assets) would take well over a minute to load.
Audience and presentation
The main audience for the website was the professors overseeing the design studio project. It was presented live on a Sun computer. I can't remember if it was accessed via HTTP as a URL or if we simply loaded a local web page in the Mosaic browser on the workstation.
In any event, it was for a small, controlled, audience. The presentation was driven by me (clicking and scrolling). They weren't familiar with the concept of the web, let alone a web browser, let alone a mouse in some cases. It's hard to remember how "novel" this was at the time.
Eventually the web page was made available in a student section on the University website, where it lived for a few years until they created a formal web presence and wiped out the historical student pages.
Does it still work?
Here's the thing... 29 years later it still works. Exactly as well as it did in 1994 with no changes required. That's pretty amazing. Do you have any other software from 1994 that works today on modern computers without any changes?
// ka
