Website Design – A Personal Testimony on Its Short History

Website design is the result of an evolution in the technology of the web. When I started with the Internet in the early 1990′s, the World Wide Web didn’t exist then. In fact browsers barely came into existence. My computer at that time was a 386 motherboard, with 80 megs of memory. It was considered to be a lot at that time. I was operating a DOS platform. When I login to the Internet, it was with a modem over a telephone line. Once my connection was made, my computer became what they called a dumb computer.

A dumb computer meant that my computer became the extension of the computer that I was connected to, which was a server. In another word, I was literally working with the server. The server language was not DOS, it was UNIX, a whole different language. At that time it was totally impossible to design a website.

So I had to learn UNIX as well because in order to use the Internet, you had to write UNIX sentences which were the instructions to the server to do whatever you want. The Internet at that time was a bit boring, even appearing as a fad. What one could do was very limited.

Generally the Internet was a massive network of computers in Universities, Governments and in private enterprises, all linked together. They were operated for the needs of those institutions. The general public had only limited access to them. And in many cases, access was not allowed. HTML did not exist, so it was not possible to do a website design.

The most renowned service on the Internet was email. At that time, most electronic business communications was done through fax. Few people and few businesses had email. But to those who had, then you could send them an email. That was a great way of communicating especially if you wanted to write to parties overseas. Then instead of sending a fax which would cost an international telephone charge, you would send an email. That would cost you nothing.

Another service that was available was Groupnet. There were many various groups of people organized by interest. You could join those groups and dialogue with the members. I would say, that was the forerunner of the present forum. Those groups were very active.

Finally, another available service, was information inquiry. There were different addresses or protocols to query depending on the information you were looking for. Basically these information would have been located in either University database or Government database. Either you could have obtained the information you’re looking for or you were not allow to access them.

What kind of information would you be looking for at that time? Well, for example, at that time, I was doing research on airlines. So you could obtain information and data on the airline industry. At another time I was doing research on telecommunication. So you could obtain information on international agreements between the telecom of different countries or some data on the telecom industry in some specific countries.

Nothing like now, but at the time, things looked so wonderful. For instance, you could do research, then send an email to a Government official and ask further information on your topic. That was really progress at that time.

There were no websites existing at that period. Everything in the Internet was written in one font. No colors, no designs, no pictures existed. The whole Internet was writing only. If a company would have an advertisement on the net, it would have been black background, white letters, one font, that’s it.

Few businesses were advertising in the Internet. By the mid 1990′s a browser of the name of Mosaic came around and a few World Wide Web sites began to appear. I had gotten a Pentium 1 at the time. It is still working up to now. Not able to make many contemporary applications, but it works well for what it’s capable of doing.

With my Pentium 1, I was able to run Windows 95. It was a world of change compared to DOS. By that time, people began to develop and create websites. Ever since Windows came in, the Internet has been going through an exploding evolution.

Copyright © 2010