Like many other geeks I know, I store and backup files forever. I just found a ZIP file containing my first website, the first on-line one that is. I’ve put this ugly monster together when I was 13 years old, circa 1997! I had fun opening it now and taking a look.
At first I thought of making this post private and show it only to my friends, then I realized that besides how ugly and silly the website was, not a lot 13 year old kids where doing HTML back in the 90s. So here it is! feel free to laugh at it with me.
Some historical context
- Google.com did not exist yet! I was using AltaVista and Yahoo.
- HoTMaiL was still written like that, H.T.M.L, and it had nothing to do with the Redmond guys yet.
- By that time, I still had Windows 95, and Internet Explorer 3.0, yay!
- I had a 28.800Kbps modem at home. V.34 US Robotics. Dazzling fast.
The site was about video game console emulation, and it basically contained reviews and links to other sites where you could actually download things. The all-static site was hosted at the now defunct Geocities, with some very long URLs, for free, but with very limited space.
How it looked like
Or at least how it looks now in the beta chromium browser for Linux. Probably quite different from what it looked like in IE3.0 and 4.01
What a horrible name! The broken images were external, including the large banner at the top that was part of some banner interchange site.
The site was written in both Spanish and Engrish, just duplicating everything every time. I did not really speak English back then, and for what I can see in some of the other pages, I was not very good at writing it either. Not that I improved that much anyway :-)
There was a newsletter! with 4 subscribers or so, but it was not really monthly.
The code
The dark ages of web design. Frames.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="Author" content="Ivan Stepaniuk" />
<meta name="Description" content="ROMs links and emulators" />
<meta name="Keywords" content="roms, emulation, sega, genesis" />
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET COLS="25,75" BORDER=0 FRAMEBORDER=NO FRAMESPACING=0>
<FRAMESET ROWS="800,*" BORDER=0 FRAMEBORDER=NO FRAMESPACING=0>
<FRAME SRC="navbar.html" name="navbar" noresize scrolling=auto>
</FRAMESET>
<FRAMESET ROWS="800,*" BORDER=0 FRAMEBORDER=NO FRAMESPACING=0>
<FRAME SRC="mframe.html" name="Main" noresize scrolling=auto>
</FRAMESET>
</FRAMESET>
<NOFRAMES>
<h1>Sorry.</h1>
<p>
You need a frames capable browser to view this page
The non frames version is not available
</p>
<p>
Mailme at <a href="mailto:pirp9@geocities.com">pirp9@geocities.com</a>
</p>
</NOFRAMES>
</HTML>
At some point in time I switched to Internet Explorer 4, and that came with Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0, it was a horrible thing, but using the WYSIWYG editor and then tinkering with the generated markup seemed like a good way to start.
The layout was constructed with <TABLE> elements, a common practice back then, and all the colored text in the HTML was made
with <FONT> tags, like this:
<FONT size="3" color="#8080ff">
These roms are <b>not working.</b>
</FONT>
Changing anything was really painful. There was no JavaScript except for some window.status magic, and all the forms pointed to
Geocities form-to-mail CGI. Try that nowadays and it will fill your inbox with spam in just a few minutes. Learning some CSS took many more years.
Don’t panic!
I used one of these too: 
