Acetio | Blogma

In 1994, my first job out of college was creating educational videos for the Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell University. It was toward the end of the year when I was talking to my boss about this thing called The Web because it seemed that a number of other academic departments had web sites (that is why the Web was developed in the first place, after all). I suggested that we should have one, too.

He said, "Good idea. Do it."

I didn't know anything about what to do, but there was literally a pile of Sparc Alpha workstations in one closet and I took one to be the server.

The IT guy set up the domain. We were already under "bio.cornell.edu" and he suggested calling our server "www.bio.cornell.edu".
At the time, prefixing the domain with "www" was not a very standard convention, and I suggested that we use "web" instead of "www" simply because when speaking the name to people, "www" was nine syllables and "web" was only one.

And there were some CS undergrads who helped me set up the NCSA httpd. It would have been a good time to be studying CS, I think. And Cornell in particular was ahead of the curve in terms of Internet technology compared with most other Universities. Even in the late 80s students were regularly spending their evenings in chat rooms and had already made a lifestyle out of being "online". 'Gopher' and 'Archie' were big back then. Remember that?

So, I got to work learning HTML, which was quite easy back then. There was no CSS implementation. Mosaic was the only browser available (what a big deal when version 1.3 was released!) web pages could not have colored backgrounds, just that standard gray background. There were no TABLE tags, so all pages were just single scrolling columns. I was lucky to learn the technology back then, because it made it easy to absorb each new development as it arose. People learning all that stuff from scratch now have a big hill to climb.

I also started coding JavaScript with this site, which (other than some stuff on the Atari 800XL) was my only exposure to programming. It was a great way to learn because you didn't need an IDE, you don't have to compile everything, and all the output is visual (mostly text manipulations) so you know immediately whether your code worked or not. To any person who wants to learn programming, I whole-heartedly recommend starting with JavaScript.

So I cranked out pages for the Division and lots of other departments. At one point, more than 10% of all pages at Cornell were hand-coded by me. That changed as other departments got on the bandwagon and started their own sites. Remarkably, the last two departments on campus to start web sites were the Depts. of Communication and Education.

Since I left in 1997, most of the vestiges of my labors have gone. It was a good learning experience.