I was arguing with a plugin on the company website right before lunch, and then while munching on my PB&J came to the conclusion that I’ve been doing this entirely too long…
My first web page went online on the cold Sunday morning of Jan 7th, 1996. It was just a personal page hosted at dimensional.com over in Denver…
As is obvious, I’d been using things like Photoshop for years at this point, so my first foray onto the Internet was pretty graphically intense.
A few months after this I started “FurSpace”, a MUCK, with some other BBS folks in the 303 area code. And shortly after this met RSO who was running UniGraphix – a for-hire art shop specializing in dye sublimation printing and representing artists at various sci-fi / fantasy conventions…
With these events my personal page became a bit more hobby-centric and I designed / hosted the sites for several endeavors…
The above is what the site looked like on the 13th of March, 1997.
At this time the pages were being served in my living room using WebSTAR on a PowerMac 8100/100.
By 1999 I was living in central Virginia, working in D.C. and had a T1 run into my bedroom for my Internet efforts… This is when I set up rihahn.com and set up another personal website…
This page is actually pretty complicated for the day; it’s made of a dozen images very precisely positioned to create what looks like a single image. This was to make the page look ‘active’ on a 28.8kbps modem while it was loading… A static image this size would result in a blank page for however long it took to download the entire image — around 10-15 seconds. But all of the smaller images would start loading at once and at least show that something was happening.
The JavaScript I wrote to run this page no longer runs in modern browsers – there are mouseover effects and click animations on the buttons which are impossible to do on a static image.
The boxes on the lower right are from the non-existent visitor counter that has long since gone the way of the dodo. It would normally be horizontal numbers and the site was apparently in the 6-digits of visitors by early 2000.
The other website I was hosting was the site for my roommate’s MUCK “Unbridled Desires” – of which there are still links pointing to my rihahn.com domain… Which is why there’s a placeholder page at https://rihahn.com/ud/…
And here we are today…
I’ve been doing web ‘stuff’ for over thirty years now, and my personal domain – rihahn.com – has been running for about 27 years.
I’ve been doing this entirely too long. 🙂
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