On Friday, August 30th, 1996, I published a message on the “soc.culture.argentina” Usenet newsgroup, announcing the existence of a new page on this thing called “the web”: the URL was http://sc2a.unige.ch/~kosmacze and it was my first personal website.
That URL does not exist anymore, and sadly the Internet Archive never archived it. I do have some fragments here and there, in some very old CD-ROMs I burned at the turn of the millenium, but I haven’t been able to find a proper, exhaustive backup of the whole thing. To give you an idea, this is what the home page of sc2a.unige.ch looked like in December of 1996. This was “the web”; a bunch of text formatted with Times New Roman, or whatever the default serif font was in your workstation.
In that message I also asked for help, since I was using a text-based operating system (a VAX system running an old version of VMS) and I did not have a computer with Netscape available to test the page. Imagine that. How did I create that content? At home, using HoTMetaL Pro and an HTML plugin for Microsoft Word 6.0 that could save documents as (horrendous, let’s be honest) HTML. Years later I moved into EditPlus, FrontPage, Dreamweaver… but not yet at that point. This was just me, most probably Notepad, and some late night HTML knowledge on my PC running Windows 3.1.
How did I get this knowledge? Well, through Elizabeth Castro’s awesome HTML Visual Quickstart Guide 1st Edition! The last edition I could find of that book was from 2018.
Some of the older articles in this blog were initially published in that page, like for example my tongue-in-cheek manual for users of the Internet at the sc2a.unige.ch server, or my first JavaScript calculator. I even published a journal of my 1996 trip to Argentina… maybe one day I’ll publish it again here.
That website single-handedly kickstarted my career as a professional web designer, programmer, and now, 30 years later, software architect. It all boils down to that moment in time, when I used FTP to upload those humble HTML files into the VMS account that my university provided their students with.
Since then, web technology evolved in uncanny and extraordinary ways; from the wonder of AJAX, which I first saw in action in 2002, to Flash movies, to XML, to JSON, to CSS, to WebSockets, to the <canvas> tag, to the incredible evolution of JavaScript (both on the client and server sides), to Java applets, to WebAssembly, I’ve used pretty much every single technology that browsers have made available to us.
It all started the moment I decided to click on the “View Source” menu on Netscape, and started to learn how websites were made.