Stuff I’ve Hoarded From the Early Days of the World Wide Web

Hi,

I’m Brett and I’m currently an English teacher. Before that I was a web developer. For a long time.

I still think the Internet is quite new. But I was actually building web pages before my current generation of students were even born.

I built my first web page in 1995. In those days it took me and a friend 3 days to install a web browser on a PC. Nobody could access the Internet on their mobile phones. Come to think of it, only one person I knew had a mobile phone.

In this post I’ll share with you some of the stuff I’ve hoarded from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. As I find more stuff, I’ll post it here. Let me know if you like any of it.

I think the Internet has got better these days, but my hoarding has got worse.

Failed Dot Coms

Here’s some images from Student24-7.com. I tell the story of this site in this post.

Sorry they’re so small. Actually I think they are full size. It’s just that they were designed for 14 inch monitors with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels! They look so tiny on my 4K laptop display.

They might look crude and dated but they were actually designed by Kerb, which was at the time a top Brighton based digital media agency. I remember they specialised in Asian style graphics.

Early Brettb.com

So this is brettb.com circa 1995. Actually I didn’t register my domain name until 1999. Before then it was on my university’s web server, then on a Demon Internet tenner a month hosting account.

I guess it’s a testament to my HTML and Firefox’s rendering capabilities that you can still read this page. So many other technologies have fallen by the wayside, never to be seen by mankind ever again.

In 1995 there was no Google or Facebook. Few people had internet access at home.I actually got quite a bit of traffic, despite the lack of search engines and people actually using the internet for that matter.

Do you have any memories from the good old days of the WWW? Please post a comment below if you have some interesting recollections.

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