Cybersoc.com: February 2003
Last Sunday was the 8th anniversary of this blog – which I started on the 24th of March, 2005. I’d had a website for a long time before that, however, with versions captured by the Way Back Machine going all the way back to 1996.
It looks like I began posting regular updates, in reverse chronological order – blogging – in around 1997 when I started publishing photos and stories from my travels. I also, around the same time, created a page called “dress Robin” where visitors to the site could help me choose what to wear. It was a strange time.
The fact that I was one of the few people I knew who knew how to make a simple web page encouraged me to put the following strap-line on my pages:
As well as being a starving student, Robin Hamman is also an experienced web publisher. If you would like more information on low cost web pages for yourself or business, please contact Robin. This page was created using Adobe Pagemill for Macintosh. Until recently, this site was maintained using a Macintosh Powerbook 520c. We are now using a Macintosh Performa 6400 PowerPC. Demon Internet and America Online provide the web space for this site.
I guess use of the word “we” was an attempt to make it sound like I wasn’t a one man band. In the mid-90’s, I only sold one website, and that was a simple one page site for the estate agent who rented me a room in a shared house in Liverpool. I think he gave me a few months free rent in exchange for building and maintaining the page.
Here’s a screenshot of my homepage in 2003 which, you’ll have to believe me, was a dramatic improvement on previous iterations:
So what was the internet like in the mid 90’s? Well, here’s a glimpse of what, back then, was the future…