Before the internet, I had some experience in BBS's. I first got hooked up to the internet through Achilles -- some kid who looked like he might be in high school still came over on a motor scooter and installed the stuff I needed on my system (... you don't get service like that these days -- at least not for free!). At first, I logged in as a remote terminal on a UNIX system. I had to learn some UNIX and various UNIX clients (pine, elm, vi editor). UNIX is a true multitasking operating system, and one problem I had to go running to the server administrator for a few times was starting up multiple incidents of, say, vi editor and not being able to get them shut down properly. Yeesh! So embarrassing!
I can't remember where I first heard about the World Wide Web -- I think it might have been in a Scientific American article. There was no Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator then -- the first few times I surfed the internet, I surfed in text mode! I played around with a gui client, XWindows before finding Windows clients such as Eudora and Pegasus for mail, and Netscape Navigator for the web.
A friend of mine in BC had organized some IRC rooms for our sport, and started up an e-mail listserv for us. Around that time, I was putting together my very first web page for my own business (... my other business, I was semi-retired and not taking new clients with this one at the time) and for my skydiving centre. He was enthusiastic about putting together a web page for our national sport association, and turned over to me the task of building a directory for all our member centres across Canada. I had no book or tutorial for html -- all we could do is go into source code for pages we found online and try to figure out how to get the results we wanted!
Around that time, I had an idea to make up sort of a 1-stop page for an industry where users could go to find everything available in their area. I had a friend who was a calligrapher and did wedding invitations, custom certificates, etc. and I thought she might be interested in putting something together for special events planning -- but no one I talked to about it was very interested. They viewed the internet and web as being things that few people would have access to or look to for information. So I had another friend who was into alternative health care, and I proposed the same to her and her friends. But they weren't too interested either, for the same reasons. My husband finally said, why don't you do something for the adult industry in Ottawa. So I started Lyla's List. I did learn a bit of cgi scripting in perl to accomplish searches and such on that site -- but now I shudder looking back to think how vulnerable my amateur script must have been! Hackers today would make short work of it.
Since I gave up Lyla's List in 2002, I find that I use the internet more than ever -- but I'm a lot more selective about how I use it. I still do my own very simple sites, but I have no interest in doing any for anyone else. Today, there are so many tools available -- such as LiveJournal, Flickr and Picassa -- that are easy and full-featured. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? That said, when it comes to teaching someone else, that's always a problem for me. One big consideration is what their base knowledge of computers, file systems, etc. is -- the actual web page mechanics are fairly simple.
It might be a loooooonnnnnnggg summer. But then, if I get my hardheadedness from anyone, it's from my aunt. Chances are, it won't be too long before you won't be able to tell her anything she hasn't already figured out on her own.
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joyfulc1957- Being joyful in Ottawa
- Joyful Spirit