Back in 1995 I loved computers and the Internet, I had no idea what the Internet really was though. I truly though AOL was the Internet!
I saw the commercials on TV and saved all of the floppy discs that came in the mail from AOL, Netscape and other service providers. I would take these disks and flip the tab so I could erase them and use them, then I would put on my own label and think about how clever I was get to get a free disk, I literally had 100′s.
When I finally convinced my dad to get a 14.4 modem for our computer it was one of the coolest and most anticipated moments of my childhood. We were going to be high tech and one of the first in our small town to actually have the Internet (whatever that meant).
We had a computer tech guy come out to our home to install the software, get the modem working with our computer and finally get us on the Internet. I remember that this took about 4-6 hours. It was a brutal wait. No one else in my family really cared, they all thought it was cool, but this was life changing for me. I had no idea what was in store and I could barely stand it.
About a year I had decided that I wanted to be a programmer. I had found plenty of content online about writing HTML documents and coding in Qbasic. I brought this information to my school but they had no idea what to do with it, eventually after about a year I convinced them to let me start a programming class in our school. It consisted of me, but it was awesome.
I was the first person in our town to have a website to, it kind of made me a mini celebrity with some of the techies in the community. I was the proud owner of a notepad written Geo-cities website. Complete with animated gifs, a web counter, personal photos, my likes and interests, a Netscape compatible and links to my online friends with websites. What more could you possibly want in a website. I wish I still had that website today!
My next big project was in Qbasic. As a sophomore in high school I started work on what I considered to be the coolest program ever written. It was a website builder in Qbasic. The program took you though a series of questions about what you wanted your website to look like. What color did you want the background (you could only choose from 5 different colors), what did you want the title to be, it could insert one picture (if you made sure to label it correctly and put it in the right folder) and you could write one paragraph of text. What more could a user want in a website? Thankfully I still have this program along with about 100 others that I thought were the Cat’s Meow back then.
If you have any of these memories here is a great tool that is sure to bring a smile to your face:
http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/
Ahhh Memories
