A Personal History of the Web

A lot has been written about millennials and our coming of age alongside the early internet. We were the first generation to grow up with the web gradually entering our homes¹. The timing of millennial kids learning how to use the internet at the same time as our parents feels especially historically unique. WWW may as well have stood for the Wild West of the Web because it was so random in it's infancy.

Surfing the Early Web

I was around eight years old when my family first got dial-up from America Online through one of those infamous free trial CD-ROMs. AOL was more than just a browser back then, it felt more like a neighborhood. AOL had its own ecosystem of pages and categories: Sports, Music, History, Literature, Personal Pages, etc. People built hobby sites long before the word “blog” existed. You’d stumble onto pages called something like “Matt’s Awesome Homepage” filled with animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, guestbooks, MIDI music, and walls of text in bright colors. The more chaotic the site the funner it was to build.

Ironically back then, the indie web was often easier to browse than the “professional” websites. I remember trying to visit sites like Cartoon Network or Disney on our painfully slow connection and waiting forever for Flash intros and oversized images to load. Meanwhile, some random fan-made wrestling page on Angelfire would appear almost instantly.

One of my older sister’s friends occasionally gave me music recommendations over AIM (I’m pretty sure she sent me MP3s directly through chat) and she introduced me to Okayplayer.com. I mostly remember browsing the forums and reading conversations about artists connected to the underground hip-hop scene². But what stuck with me most was the design. Even back then, Okayplayer felt polished in a way that stood apart from most websites I visited. I’ve always used it as a reference for web design inspiration.

First Forays into Web Design

I remember my friend and neighbor who was my age was building a website about Metallica. Knowing that other kids my age built websites gave me the confidence to try it myself.

I don’t remember exactly how I first learned HTML, but I do remember discovering “View Source.” Realizing you could right-click on a webpage and inspect the actual code behind it felt revolutionary.

Most sites at the time still relied heavily on inline styling. I barely remember seeing separate CSS files in those early days. Instead, I’d copy and paste snippets of HTML from tutorials or other websites into my Angelfire page editor and slowly piece things together through experimentation.

My first website was, embarrassingly, dedicated to WWF wrestlers. I created pages for different wrestlers with photos, biographies, and whatever trivia I could find online. At one point I figured out how to keep a navigation menu loaded in a separate frame, which felt incredibly advanced at the time. Another thing I remember is getting a subdomain from cjb.net and pointing it at my site. Watching the visitor counter move was really the only clue I had as to whether anyone was stumbling upon my site. I've tried to look up some of my old content on the Wayback machine to no avail. Maybe that's for the best though as some things need to stay in the past, such as being a fan of The Undertaker.

Because CSS was still primitive, building a website in HTML mostly meant tables nested inside other tables. I spent hours making text banners and graphics to fit into those layouts. What I remember most about that era is how open everything felt. Nobody seemed particularly elitist about web design yet. Most people were hobbyists learning as they went, borrowing code from each other.

Today’s internet is faster, cleaner, and infinitely more polished. But it’s also more centralized and less personal. The early web felt messy and amateur in the best possible way. Those hours spent on the computer shaped so many of the hobbies and interests that defined my adolescence: skating, hip-hop, drawing, and eventually web design itself.

Footnotes

1. I do get really nostalgic thinking about when the internet was restricted to the home computer and having to take turns or be mindful of the fact that someone might try to call the house ↩

2. Important discoveries included Rahzel the human beatbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNVDAiOwTy0 ↩