Ye olde beautiful Web
February 7, 2025
It's 1999, you're 14 years old, you just downloaded your first song from Napster (it's I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones, BTW). Then you decide that it's a good time to program something, so you spin up Visual Basic 5.0 and start coding some simple program (do you remember when we called them programs or software instead of apps?) and you write some ugly code that connects to a Microsoft Access database so your father can keep his contacts there. Then you press play and voilà, it worked like a charm. That moment was magic, you felt like a wizard, you felt like you could do anything. Maybe the code was ugly but, at the same time it, was glorious.
I got the same feeling of magic and wizardry when I started to create my first web pages. I'm not saying that I started writing HTML code because I used a little incredible tool that came with Windows 98: FrontPage Express. That little WYSIWYG editor was, from my young perspective, one of the most amazing things in the world. You just dropped some controls, some text here, some images there, then some <blink> and <marquee> tags over there and you had a web page. And if you feel bold enough or pro enough, you just dropped some iframes here and there.
And one of the best things was that, even though some editors had templates, every one was creating their own unique designs. That old, ugly, and beautiful web was a place of immense creativity. You could do whatever you wanted, you could create your own world. And that was amazing. And it was also a real open world. It was the dream of open knowledge. Do you know how some random dude in Kansas City create that web that looked so cool? You just view the source and it was all there. That was an incredible way to learn. You wanted to make it more unique? Then you could find o create your own GIF images to add some spice to your page. That web didn't look at all like the boring and endless Blogspot blogs.
Remember the under construction gifs? Taken from Textfiles
Now, you have your site, you have all those great HTML pages that look amazing and you want to share them with the world so you need to hosted them somewhere. And that's when you discovered the world of free hosting. You could host your site on GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and many others. Personally, I used Portland, which was not only free but it also was ad-free (and you throw in there you CGI scripts and Escapade scripts [that was a really obscure scripting language made by one Ed Carp that, I don't know, looked maybe something like ColdFusion]).
Did I just say CGI scripts? Hell yeah. If you wanted to add some interactivity to your site like a guestbook, a counter, a forum or a form to send you an email you just search the Internet for a while and you would find what you needed. Or you could visit Matt's Script Archive and download some Perl scripts that you could run on your server. And you could even modify them to suit your needs. And that was amazing. BTW, https://www.scriptarchive.com/ is still up and running as of February 2025.
And that was it. You just glued together some HTML and some Perl and you felt like the king of the world and like you could win your first million right there.
Even the old web portals of those days were more exciting than what we have now. Yahoo! was cool (see that "What's New" icon? It's just beautiful), Lycos was cool, AltaVista was cool. And even the first version of Google was cool. Do you remember the first time you saw the Google homepage? It was so simple. Now every God damn site it's so polished that they look like a freaking Imperial Star Destroyer.
And I would say that that web was truly social or at least more social than the web we have now. You had guestbooks that you signed saying things like "Hey, greetings from Rocha, Uruguay. Your site is really cool. Keep up the good work!". Or you posted your site in a web ring and you add a link for that ring or maybe a banner linking to your friends' site. And that was so fun and you just wake up the next day and rush into your guestbook to see if someone had signed it. I think that we've lost some of that naivety.
So, are these the ramblings of a guy who is getting old? Maybe. But I think that we've lost something along the way. Or at least I feel that I might have lost something along the way. Don't get me wrong, I love all the tech that powers the web now. That tech has been built by extremely talented people and it's amazing what it can achieve. But it would be nice to go back to that web for at least a day. Just to remember how it felt to be a wizard.