…my site (cherryh.com, the mothership for this blog) is not quite that old, but it’s been there a while…I think since about 1993, maybe earlier. I could see the importance of having a web presence. I knew very little about HTML—I got the HTML for Dummies book, and hired a guy to do the graphics you can still see (old-fashioned, yep, I’m a Historical Internet Landmark) back in the 90’s. Had no idea at all how to organize it, except on the model of an sf convention.
It’s huge, sloppy, and I haven’t updated the main body of it in a year (gotta tend to that soon)–but it’s kind of like a large museum and library of bits and bobs, the sort of place you can wander around in it, the attic where I store stuff. Wave is structurally part of it: the WP sites require an HTML index page for an ‘anchor’ and initial navigator, so it was easy to tack it on.
The site has lost the visitor-count three times and had to be re-started from what I could recall as the number, so the count would be quite a bit higher if I had set the first re-start where I should have: I can’t remember numbers worth a damn, and I think I lost about 50,000 visits. This is my brain on numbers, eh?
I did the splash page and other artwork, off a very rudimentary graphics program: Microsoft Image Composer. So it’s far from professional, but it’s vintage Me.
Nowadays I can type in HTML for elementary purposes. I’ve officially stopped short of learning PHP—I decided that when we decided not to go with Joomla! and to adapt a WP template, which has adapted pretty well, imho. But all resolutions are subject to change.
So as far as the WWW goes, we’re kinda venerable. And we just keep swimming…just keep swimming…
Here’s the site for the Gough Map, the 14th century map of England and most likely the first such map.
http://www.goughmap.org/
For me it is extremely slow; could be any number of things of course, servers, high volume, etc. But still, interesting.
The Wayback Machine has copies of your site going back to November 19, 1996. That may be about the time the Wayback Machine started operating.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://cherryh.com
The first web site I did was for a ballet dancer in 1994, likely the first one on the intar-webs. It was super primitive and hung off a unix shell based internet access company I worked for. Now it’s got a domain and the guy manages it himself with widgety online tools that make what we sweated bullets over look like child’s play. Now the issues around his web site are ones of domain ownership (NO! Do Not Put domain in Limited Partnership where you can lose control of it!) and stuff like that rather than doing updates using FTP and testing in all available browsers. (Mosaic!)
Got tanstaafl.com registered in 1994 and still own it, and still have pretty basic stuff on it. I’m a big fan of simplicity – makes stuff easier to fix! Every time I look at Cherryh.com it takes me back, and frankly your site is way fancier than mine was, but still “do-able” by hand, FTW!
I admire that you do it yourself rather than farming it out, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy!
I’m pretty sure it was late 1995 or early 1996. It was certainly well after I arrived in OKC, which was January, 1994. I don’t think we were on the Internet until after we upgraded to Windows 95. Prior to that, it was CompuServe (I sill occasionally get spam directed to my old CS address…truly the Internet never forgets!) Remember qns.com, our first ISP? Trumpet? Winsock? and HotDog Pro?
Congrats on the longevity.
In 1991 I was still navigating the Internet though the command line interface and playing around with the C shell.
It wasn’t until 1996 that I set up my own web page, which is still up.
That’d be right, Threadbender. OMG, QNS! Our original server. Remember the ‘Pancake Stack’s’ [so named by the locals for its architecture] basement flooded and blew the power to all their servers—to stay in business, they ran a fat yellow power cord across the parking lot to a neighboring building. It tolerated cars, but every time a heavy truck ignored the warning signs and drove across it—it died.
The good thing was, you could call up the head honcho at QNS and tell him about it.
Trumpet, Winsock, and TuCows http://FTP…ah, those were the days of glory, my friends! 350 baud modems, dialup—I went kicking and screaming off DOS to Windows, believing it was a Gatesian plan to put a layer between user and programming and then cut us absolutely off from command level. I still believe in it, understand, but I think the culprit is Google.
Sysinternals, FTW!
Being cut off from command level is getting closer and closer with Vista & Win7; while not removed, at least now (by default) hidden from casual users.
I still have a machine running Win98, as some of my software won’t run with XP and has no upgrade available (the company that put it out was bought and the new owners have a different take on things). I just have to convince it sometimes that it does have a mouse, really.
(Also, there’s no real way to get a directory list out of Windows without going to the DOS prompt.)
Heavens, yes — the Pancake Stack! And the flood…I have this fuzzy memory that we actually wound up down there helping to bail them out (literally, for a change).
I still have access to the command line in Windows 7 and still use it every so often when I’ve got to figure out where in the world a network’s bottleneck actually is. I like knowing it’s there, but I’m not sure I’d want to go back to a full-time, command-line interface. I’ve usually got three or four programs open at a time and swap data between them constantly…not something easily done with the command line.
I don ‘t precisely remember how I stumbled across cherryh.com, but I do recall that it was not too long prior to the house-hunting saga. Having done that myself in the not too distant past at that time, I was watching it unfold and cheering when you and Jane eventually found your current abode. Even though we didn’t have a site up yet, we remember dialup, when 300 baud was standard, then the jump to 56k gave us (at the time) god-like power!
We were living in an old section of Oahu, a tiny residential area surrounded by commercial and industrial, and the power was subject to extreme fluctuations; we used to joke that we would take a hit every time they threw in a pizza at Domino’s down the street. One night the lights suddenly brightened to about twice normal intensity and stayed there for 15 minutes. People up and down the street came boiling out of their houses, worried that the ca. 1960 wiring was going to catch fire. Ah, the good old days…
300baud to 56k without any 14.4 or 2400? That is a substantial jump!
Yah — we dragged on at 300 for a loooong time, spent about a month at 14.4, then got 56k. And there was great rejoicing (yay!~)
Lol—I remember flying with my computer: an Atari, with 2 disk drives, and a pretty substantial buffer-box: you plugged the video cord into any television of the day, plugged an i/o cord from the Atari into the interface box, then cords from there I think to the buffer, then to the disk drives in sequence…
I’m in Florida. I have made these bags for the pieces of the Atari, and the cords. And they’ve just had some plane hijacked to Cuba, so security is as nervous as it is now. They give me the once-over, and are really suspicious of the gear—and then they pull one of the disk drives (5 and 1/4″ floppies) out of the orange quilted bag and start to push the button. My life flashes before my eyes: guns everywhere, and this woman punches the button. I say: “There’s a spring on that—” —door, I would have said, but it sproings open and the entire clutch of security guards levitate. I finish, “It’s a disk drive. Computer. It just does that.”
Took me a while but I did get there. And back again. And put away the orange quilted bags, figuring I’d handwrite it and re-enter it when I got home. The buffer box? I forget how many K it added to that 48k machine, but my word processing software was only 12k (no safety net on that one: it didn’t ask mother, may I when you absentmindedly told it to shut down.)
When I replaced that machine, I put my car up for collateral and got an IBM 600 [I think it was] with a laser printer. I had that little Atari so wired and buffered it took the advanced IBM to replace it.
The laser printer was, however, a boon. I learned guitar while waiting for my Centronics printer—and a printout of a novel required many, many floppies in order, and staying up til 4 am, dozing and getting up when the printer fell silent.
Tractor feed paper. I once left it printing out an acceleration to light speed bit of math when I went to lunch: it was long, I didn’t want to interrupt it, but hey, I was hungry—and I came back to find a billowing sea of paper around the desk.
I have a wide-carriage tractor-feed printer. And a box of ribbons. They’re hard to kill. (It was my father’s printer. He’s been dead almost as long as the Internet has been around, but he would have enjoyed surfing it, I think. He certainly seemed to enjoy beta-testing the old Norton utilities.)
Speaking of websites, National Public Radio has a top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Vote running. A few of the nominees are:
The Company Wars, by C.J. Cherryh
The Faded Sun Trilogy, by C.J. Cherryh
The Foreigner Series, by C.J. Cherryh
The Pride Of Chanur, by C.J. Cherryh
Vote here: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles
You can vote for ten!
I’d used 300-baud acoustic couplers in high school, the public school system had a student server and allowed students to check out terminals for a week. What we now call “chat” was CBE — Citizen’s Band Emulator. I remember bopping around on bbs’s a few years after that using a rummage-sale-find Zenith all-in-one keyboard with an integral 300-baud direct-connect modem, but at that time 2400 was coming into vogue. A friend had a three-terminal minicomputer in his basement, the hard-wired terminals were 9600. I think I’d gotten up to a 1200-baud system before I joined the Army in ’91, then had no time for online stuff, until I got out, then better stuff was available. Used rommate’s equip for a while, when I got my own, I had a 56K modem — the best speed I could usually get out of it was 43.333 or 46.666, occasionally 48.0
I had to convey a set of long files to another professional when the only option for such operations that I knew of was to post it to a sort of private bb. It took us two days of fussing with phones and glitches to handshake and actually get the files across with a 350 baud modem, or less. Sort of like pouring molasses on an ice floe. We were so cutting-edge!
Oh, and Winchester drives. I recall going into OKC Channel 4’s studio for an interview: in the back bowels of the station (which, like most stations, is a maze) was this rolling cart belonging to the weather department: it held two or three Winchester drives each about the size of an old VCR…a lot of cabling, and the sign, involving many exclamation points, DO NOT BUMP THIS CART!!!!! Winchester drives were (gasp) measured in gigs, and were notorious for sensitivity: a shock, reputedly even a heavy footstep, could screw them up.
To this day I nearly have heart failure when a cat knocks over one of our book-sized terabyte drives.
Don’t you mean “Winchester drives were measured in MEGS” ???
Of course, at the time, 8″ floppy (or maybe 5-1/4″ single-density) were nearly the only other options…a few hundred “K” of storage! 3.5″ floppies were amazing when they came out, just over a whole MEG, on a smaller disk! *wow* Kids these days are so jaded… 😉
^— unless I’m getting the time frame for your TV visit wrong?
I’ll bet you’re right, Xheralt. All I know is they were touchy, and I only saw those, ever. I was duly impressed, as I was warned to walk very softly in the vicinity of that cart.
Ah history. I used to be in data recovery and the first drive I ever recovered data from was a 40MB Seagate. One of the first ever IDE drives. The first HDD I ever owned was a year before that and it was a 20MB Seagate. These days almost all the applications I write need more memory than that just to run :-/
The really shocking thing is the physical size now. I have a 32GB flash card in my mobile and it’s only the size of the nail on my little finger!
Then again I sometimes forget how long I’ve been in this game. It’s coming up to 25 years now – a quarter of a century. The most important thing I’ve learnt in that time is that what goes around comes around. First it was dumb terminals, then it was desktops and now it’s ‘The Cloud’ which is just a fancier type of dumb terminal set up. Oh and ‘The Cloud’ is certainly not revolutionary. CompuServe was pretty much a ‘cloud service’ and that was around in the 80s.
Data recovery: I knew a chap who was involved in the recovery of early NASA mission data from a storeroom full of punch cards–
Punch cards—a fellow grad student at Hopkins was working on lifesupport systems as his study: he’d load the cards in—and the computer would spit them out. Again. And again. And again. Damaging some in the process.
We are so spoiled!
I was on the team that did the actuarial research for the NYC bankruptcy back in the 70s. The team was charged with untangling the city’s pension funds and my job was to prep the data for analysis. The data? They drove a step-van up from City Hall and dumped a couple of mail-carts filled with thousands of loose punchcards supposedly containing the data for every current, past, and retired uniformed-services employees onto the loading dock. We loaded the cards into deck readers without regard for how we were loading them, then I wrote a program (COBOL!!!!) that figured out which were right-side up, upside-down, reversed…and, of course, which ones had been rendered unreadable by mold or silverfish. I was inordinately proud of my silverfish routine….
The silverfish routine should be enshrined in computer history, right along with the original computer bug.
Ah, the good old days. Paper tape, giant platters of magnetic tape, telepunch terminals, sheaves of punchcards, giant floppy discs that were 8″ before they became 5.25″. Modem connections that required you to manually dial the phone, then once you had verified that it was connecting, seat the handset in the socket. Our smartphone now has almost as much capacity as the computers that were used to send Apollo to the moon — provided no one decides to maliciously hack it!