The Web turns 20

I remember when I first started doing HTML development for a living in early 1995. I was working at a company called Midwest Micro doing support work. I was doing work with our BBS systems and faxback systems, but we had just started our web presence. I started off handling e-mail questions and perusing usenet for customers having problems with our products to offer support. I soon discovered we need to start placing articles on our web site. While we had one person working in our company doing the HTML, I soon found it took way to long for him to get stuff our site. I took a little initiative and learned to write the HTML myself, hoping this would speed up the process of getting support articles on our web site. Soon after that, they just decided to give me full access to the servers so that I could update the support sections of our web site myself. A few months later, I was doing web-related work full time.

While I wish I had the foresight to save the first revision of the site I worked on, there's still a version of one of our first redesigns on The Wayback Machine. The version online was a ColdFusion 2.0 site. We must have gone live with this version after upgrading from ColdFusion v1.5. There's still some signs of .dbml pages, but the key new pages appear to be .cfml based.

I've always been proud of some of the work we did back then. While the designs may have stunk (especially compared to today,) we actually were pretty ground breaking back then. We were one of the first, if not the first, computer company to allow you to custom build a PC online. We had it before Gateway, Dell, etc (which were all our direct competitors at the time.)

The "Technician's Almanac" was the first project I built from the ground up. I came up with the concept and I built the code. The "Almanac" name came from the fact that my company was really using the farming theme at the time. This was the same time that Gateway was pushing the whole "Cow" theme. I'm not sure whether they started marketing the cow theme first, or if we were pushing our farm theme first (I think Gateway was first.) Anyway, the Technician's Almanac was the first intelligent troubleshooting tool on the web. It would walk you through series of questions in which you'd respond to the answer that best matched your answer. It started off asking you a question like:

What is wrong with your computer?

o I can not see my screen
o My computer is not making sound
o I can not connect send faxes with my computer
o When I try to play a game, my computer freezes

If all went well, you'd eventually be given the answer to your problem. While the system was no were near as complex or intelligent as some of the solution today (since it was essentially a static tree of questions/answered) it worked very well and did reduce our tech support load. The only problem with the application, is I never got around to build a tool to easily map questions and answered. You basically had to do the scripting by hand—which could be pretty tedious with long logic trees.

So, I solute Tim Bernes-Lee and his revolutionary idea of creating the World Wide Web. If it weren't for this little idea of his, I have absolutely no idea what I would be doing today. All I know is I'd be doing something that I probably won't be enjoying nearly as much as I do!