old
It just hit me that, ten years ago -- one full decade -- I was learning web design for the first time. I don't recall exactly when it was, but I know it was in the summer of '96. Does that make me feel old? I suppose it does in a way, although it's more a feeling of "that was ten years ago already??"
I still remember signing off AOL one day and seeing an ad on the log-off screen saying there would be an online web design class later that day. This piqued my interest, so I checked it out. There were three 30-minute sessions, and the "classes" were conducted in a "presentation style" chat room, where the teacher could give instructions to everyone in the room, but questions from attendants were approved by a moderator. We learned the basics: how to place images and text on a page, create links, set a background image, turn an image into a link, and how to upload the files to our AOL web space.
I was hooked. How cool! I just made my own web page! I didn't have much at first; just a "Welcome to BirdMan80's Home Page" graphic with a Michael Crichton quote of some sort. Inspired by some other sites I'd seen, it soon became a critique of the three major online services I'd tried (Prodigy, America Online, and CompuServe). By the time I left for college, it became "What's Your Gripe?," where I posted amusing-but-pointless gripes that people e-mailed me. I started posting haiku freshman year of college, when I wrote a new one every day on my dry erase board. In 2000, I bought bryanbird.com, but it sat as a simple placeholder page with my resume for a long time. It wasn't until December of 2002 that I came up with the current design, and even that is growing stale I think.
The summer of '96 was also special because it was the last summer in which I didn't have a job, so I was able to spend my time doing things like... learning web design.
6 Comments:
Wow, I remember those summers before I got a job...they were great. Sleep 'til 1, eat lunch, get dressed, watch TV, hang out with friends. Those were the days. Yeah, they were boring sometimes, but now that I'm a "grown-up"...days like those summers circa 1996 are how I spend my vacation.
Heh, yeah, that's how I spend my vacations now too. I don't go anywhere; I just stay home and relax. College Saturday Syndrome. Of course, back in '96 I couldn't drive yet either, so my options were few anyway. Even though my birthday was in May, I didn't get my license until September. And I drove that car (mom's) until August of last year.
The job for '97 and '98 was working on web pages and other tech-related stuff for the school system. There was a limit on how many hours we could be paid for, but we were free to go in and use the high-speed internet and computers all we wanted (we were only paid for the time we were actually doing work), so it took up as much time as a full-time job.
Back when CD-Rs cost $1 apiece and Netscape was still the browser of choice. It's amusing to think that my hard drive back then could now fit entirely within the RAM of my current computer, several times over.
I was thinking that must have been about the time I used to drive you and Tom over to that failed experiment of a high school, Elyria West, to work on that. Who was it used to buy you guys lunch?
Yes, Anne drove us out there when I couldn't wrest the car from my mom for the day. :) Also to the regular high school when my dad had early teacher meetings.
Mike McDermott was the technology director then, and he'd occasionally buy us Arby's for lunch, which was cool. Although I hear Tim Kingman and Dave Lay used to get doughnuts...
Nice post, Bryan. Reminds me of my first attempts at "web design" about a hear later - favorite quotations in bright colors (Comic Sans font), black backgrounds, bits of scanned clip-art. It was a kick. Imagine what I could have accomplished on a Mountain Dew and Captain Crunch regimen like some of you EHS guys.
Oh yes, there were pre-made web graphics galore on my first site. It turned out that Web Explosion 20,000 was a very good purchase, as I used tons of graphics off those two CDs back then.
This was back in the day when just about every web site had "Best viewed with Netscape 3.0" on it, along with "Click here to..." for every link. Oh and let's not forget the desription of every personal page as "my little corner of the Web." Apparently, back then, the Web was like one of those office buildings with jagged sides so that everyone gets a "corner office."
The "Welcome to BirdMan80's Home Page!" graphic, I recall, was made in Print Shop Deluxe so I could have curved text with gradients.
Oy, Print Shop Deluxe. I used that program a lot too. Banners, flyers, cards, whatever excuse I could find to use it. I remember how excited I was when I got my own Zip drive for Christmas... I used to run Photoshop 4 off a Zip disk because there wasn't room for the program on our hard drive.
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