In the beginning…

Friday, May 8th, 2009 @ 4:27pm

To think today that the internet is where it is today is just amazing and the amount of changes that have happened in the past 20, or even 10 years ago. 10 years ago, can you imagine when companies like Google and Amazon were in their infancy, and sites like Wikipedia, Youtube didn’t exist.

Even more interesting is how I got my start doing web development, and as I stumbled upon some of my older site designs I thought it would be interesting to showcase them, and how I got my start on the internet. It’s kind of scary for me to look back and think that I created that, but it’s here for your entertainment.

I don’t remember exactly how I first got started. I recall my dad popping in an old AOL disk cd when we had a 2400 baud modem, and attempting to access the Cartoon Network channel of AOL. It wasn’t until some time later when we eventually obtained a computer with a 28.8kbps that I got my real start sometime in 1996-1997.

My first website was a result of my infatuation with SimCity, so I wanted to share that interest with others. Through Earthlink, we had a member space available at home.earthlink.net/~charawilson/ (no longer exists) that was the jumpstart for that first site, Simcity 3000 News Central. From that spawned a sister project called SCN (SimCity Network), which was a portal for SimCity sites at the time.

Eventually I outgrew the member space that Earthlink provided, and through the generous offer of a friend moved to simcity.boulderd.com (internet archive). With the move I discovered NewsPro (which eventually became Coranto), a perl script that would allow me to update the site from anywhere and not have to edit html code any time I wanted the site to be updated. This is really where my interest starting growing, as I discovered how one could make a site dynamic, and do cool things with DHTML as well.