The lost web /
Late last night while in bed, after the chaos of the kids in the evening, I ended up letting my mind wander. My mind unexpectedly drifted back through time and landed, of course, on something development-focused. Not of today, but my own beginnings in it and the journey of growth of the web.
I started dabbling around the year 2000. Back then, things felt so simple eh? You navigated the web through Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, each with their own JS engine of course, and you edited HTML with the lovely inline CSS with tools like Adobe GoLive or Macromedia Dreamweaver.
CGI scripts linked to some Perl, C, Python, or PHP script that patched together frontends and backends like duct tape. People used things like FormMail, YaBB, WebAdverts, or the hot new items downloaded from HotScripts.com
Deployment? The sacred rite of passage: FTP! Or, if you were lucky, some cPanel setup. WYSIWYG hosting services like Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire were /the thing/, oh man, I loved those days! Everyone’s website was a masterpiece of art and creativity. Sure, today we might call it ugly, but at the time? Those websites were the bees knees.
Who didn’t love some table-based layouts, the wealth of iframes, tiled background images, every color applied to a font imaginable (in Comic Sans MS no less), dancing GIFs (and the time-tested construction GIFs!), hit counters that were the website’s trophy, pill-shaped navigation buttons, marquee text sliding across the screen.
It was just awesome in looking back on it. You can as well still access a lot of those old services, some crawlers have archived Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire websites!
Communication was another story too. You connected through Usenet threads, old-school forums like YaBB, and instant messengers like AIM and ICQ or IRC.
Fast forward to today, and it’s a whole new game. Development has evolved rapidly… so fast, you too probably didn’t even register or take notice while living through it. The leap from things like FTP to S3, shared hosting to VPS, simple scripts to containerized services… just wow.
Now we build apps housed in all these orchestrated systems with load balancers, auth layers, caching mechanisms, logging, and interconnected services which need to be always up and running. It’s powerful, scalable, and polished… but whoa, its definitely different!
Looking back on that journey, both personal and professional, it is a weird feeling, like time that passed on me too quickly to enjoy it properly. I went from cobbling together web pages in a bedroom for fun, leading to my first young gig, to architecting sophisticated systems, and somewhere along the way, I grew just as much as the tech did.
Last night’s mental wander turned into gift of nostalgia. Sometimes reflection sneaks up on you and it leaves you with a kind of appreciation you didn’t know you needed, but I sure do miss those days… can we go back in time for a bit? I want to stay a little longer.