Spring, 1998, building my first website with my son…

That’s me and my 9-month old son, sitting at the kitchen table while I read one of my first books about HTML sometime in the spring of 1997.

It’s funny how much things have changed since I built my first website back in 1997 or so. It might have been for a hand-coded “blog” I tried to manage all in HTML (not a good idea, but WordPress and precursors like MovableType weren’t really a thing yet.) Or it might have been for an extended family calendar.

Either way they never really got off the ground. Registering a domain name “only” cost $300/year! (Down from $1,000/year!) From the only domain registrar on the planet. If you wanted to actually serve a website you had to have a computer and a static IP address… also a dedicated phone line since back then even DIY web hosting involved dialup access unless you were a really big institution. And that 283×283 pixel photo of the two of us? Back then that was daringly big!

Times have changed since 1997. My son’s now grown, out of college, and on his own! We no longer have to worry about Netscape Navigator 4.0. Or any version of Internet Explorer.

Somethings haven’t changed. For instance most people (up to 85% for some sites and almost all apps) are back to using their phones to access the internet! 😂

One thing hasn’t changed though. I still really enjoy working on websites! It never gets old.

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David Innes, RealBasics.com

I've been building and maintaining websites since 1997 and building and supporting similar hypertext-driven software since 1987. I've done maintenance, support, and maintenance for physical and digital systems since 1981. And no, I still haven't seen it all but by now I usually know where to look. More about David Innes...