A few months ago I found a basket of 3.5" floppy disks from the 90s. I
decided to finally look at the data. I was specifically
interested in one disk which claimed to be pretty important from my
senior year in high school.
My plan was to at least look at the files. If there was anything worth
keeping I was going to tackle getting the data later.
My father-in-law's Windows98 PC is still in his basement office. On Sat
I worked to boot the PC up for the first time in over a decade. It made
it only as far as CMOS. I riffled through the desk and found a Windows98
boot disk (3.5"). That got me booted up into dos with access to a floppy.
At this point I was able to read the files on my 1997 floppy and see that
the files were pretty damn interesting to me.
I went back to CMOS and opened up CMOS basic settings. That menu has a
command "F3 - Detect all HDD". I punched the F3 key and tada now CMOS
knows the PC has a HDD. Save settings on exit and soon I was loading
Windows 98.
The 266 Mhz PC didn't have an ethernet jack. It did have USB ports that
were worthless. So I found some USB drivers online using my personal
desktop PC. I burned those to CD-R and was able to install them on the
266 Mhz system. This allowed me to transfer the files to my personal
machine.
I have a complete copy of the Greensboro College website from 1997. I
also have the International Student page that I wrote and is described
here. For now I'll share my paper and a high level description of the
project.
I recall my Senior year "internship" at Greensboro College with warm
feelings. I got to skip school and play with computers for 8 hours a
day. I got to play with a server. I remember having a tiny hand held
fm radio to keep me company. It was pretty lonely but I had Sheryl
Crow, The Wallflowers, and Shawn Colvin blasting from a 2" speaker
to make me smile. Such great memories.
Now if only I had spent the next four years in college focusing on
computer science, but alas I somehow decided Economics and Biology
were the way to go. What an idiot!
Here is a high school senior writing about his first semi-professional
web app gig...
Note: I've found one specific phrase in my writing below that is
insensitive to the real and horrific experience of slavery and slaves
throughout history including present day. I have not changed my words
but let them stand unedited as I wrote them in 1997. If you have
feedback please send an email to me, dirtyrig at sdf.
=============================================
Titled: Creating The Web WITH COLLINS CONOVER
Senior Project Capstone
May 25th, 1997
============================================
Creating The Web WITH COLLINS CONOVER
• What did you do for four weeks?
• How’d you do that?
• Did you learn anything doing all that slave labor?
What did you do for four weeks?
My job was to take an existing college website, use the given template
for that website and increase the amount of information found on it. I started
off the first week and even the first day just making page after page after
page to be placed on the server. I received information from many departments,
especially the athletic department. This information was usually in the form
of a windows text file which I could easily use. I cut the text from this file
and placed it into the body of the template. I also had to format each file
myself since html does not read the same way that a windows text file reads.
After doing this well into the second week I had almost finished up everything
that anybody had for me to do. This was quite a relief because even though the
process was not intellectually draining it got very boring and tedious. So I
found a way to refresh my mind and body. I went down to the student center,
found on the campus of Greensboro College, and played pool with my brother and
some other students who I have met since living in Greensboro. They had a
grill that I frequented during the day for a snack and for lunch. I didn’t
think that I should absolutely burn myself out working on the web page, so the
student center was a comfortable place to relax.
Well the students finished exams and graduation was over and the student center
basically closed so now I was a full blown hard working intern with no means of
escape. Luckily this was at the same time that Kory, my off-campus advisor,
gave me a new project. I was in charge of creating a web page for
international students. I would like to clear up a basic misconception. A web
page is not necessarily just one page on the Internet. A web page can be a
combination of pages despite the fact that it is singular in name. My
international student page probably consisted of four pages and will definitely
grow as they decide to put more information up. When creating this web page I
was encouraged not to follow the template of the Greensboro College pages. So
I had the task of creating a page that would be of interest to world-wide high
school students. This in itself was hard because everyone has there own
personality and if you design a page with extreme character you may find that a
lot of people love it and a lot of people hate it. With the increase in
character comes the increase in the range of opinions. I wanted to make it
jump out at you but I didn’t want to make it knock you over.
I started out by creating the title image that would be at the top of the page
and the side button bar that would allow the web surfer access to the other
international student pages. I also had to make the background. All of this
was done from scratch, working on Kory’s computer. I wanted the pages to
somehow be linked to the main Greensboro College page but I didn’t want this
to be in a prominent position. I wanted the surfers to look through most of
the international student pages before they ventured to the web pages of
Greensboro College. So I simply placed small links to each sub-directory of
the web page at the bottom of the pages. Adding the actual “dry”
information was the final step in creating the page and probably the easiest.
Except for those stupid tables and the time I accidentally lost all the
information that I had just typed. With the page somewhat done I let three
people see it and here is what each said. Kory liked it, so she said, but just
wanted to make sure the colors worked as well in Microsoft Internet Explorer as
they did in Netscape. One of my friends who is a rising sophomore in a big
university was disgusted and hated it. And finally, Robin my substitute
advisor said that she loved it and when I told her about the bad response I had
gotten about it she said, “that is the problem with higher education.”
How’d You do That?
Since Greensboro College already had a website, and since their webmaster, or
webmistress, had worked very diligently on it, I used the template of the site
to create more pages. I probably wrote fifty or sixty pages while I was here.
These pages were in the same format as the others on the server ( The computer
that is actually directly linked to the world wide web via a T-1 connection).
Using the college’s template was very easy. With the information in text
format, I inserted it into the body of the template adjusted the title and
header and saved the file as an html file. Finishing a handful of pages I then
went downstairs to the server and placed each page in its folder. The second I
placed them in a folder they were on the web and ready to be seen. After they
were loaded on to the server I went to Greensboro College’s web site through
Netscape and brought up each new page to check the operation of the links. If
any links were bad I would fix the file on my computer and reload the file on
the server. This, I admit, began to be tiring because I was frequently
running up and down stairs (which is what Mrs. Burgess had been doing up until
the time I got here). A week into my project they transferred the web site to
a new PC server from the older Macintosh server. The PC allowed Mrs. Burgess
to log right into it from her computer to make changes. This simple feature
was long overdue and proved to be a very convenient tool.
I also worked on my own section of the Greensboro College web site, which was
the International Student web pages.
Did you Learn Anything Doing All of This Slave Labor?
With all due respect for Kory I did start out doing slave labor, working on
very long listings of classes and dates. This work was very tedious and tiring
luckily my first day did not set the standard for days to come. I worked my
way from these tedious tasks to basic “plug and chug” work and finally I
reached projects that involved creativeness and exploration. When I came to
the later parts of my projects which included the creative portion of my left
hemisphere I began to learn about things other than just the daily workings of
an office. I learned that publishing a web page involved a lot of different
things including knowing what information to publish and knowing how to design
the page in an appealing and convenient format to the user. The more I learned
about the science of web pages, the more I realized I didn’t know. I began
to learn how to successfully build my own graphics and backgrounds for the
pages, how to create an image that sends the surfer to any number of places. I
became aware of simple ways to make the site more convenient to users by
placing links at the bottom and sides of pages.
I think these four weeks have proved helpful in opening my mind a little more
to the world, yet I also believe that I had the oportunity to learn more.
Un-like some projects I worked in an independant environment for the majority
of each day. The independance that I was faced with was a good change from the
norm, but it should have been more balanced with the equally important
apprentice relationship. This relationship would teach me skills for web
design as well as communication skills. These “people skills”, which are a
part of everyone’s maturation process, were not totally left untouched during
my project, yet it would have meant more to me had I had an equal balance of
the two.
I have really enjoyed this internship with Greensboro College. Learning what
life is like in the repetitive, real world has made me realize that I need to
enjoy the next four or more years for all they are worth and with all the
energy I can put into them. Once I enter this monotonous world there is no
going back. I just hope I can remember this next year, when someone asks me to
try out for this,or get involved with that. Thanks Greensboro Day School for
the well-rounded education and the opportunity to place myself in uncomfortable
positions (you’ve been good at that).
Collins Conover
========================================
Titled: CTWSPC
Creating the Web Senior Project Capstone
========================================
I interned with Korey Burgess, who is the webmaster and public information
employee at Greensboro College. Greensboro College is a small, liberal arts,
co-educational college located in the historical college hill district of
Greensboro. Here I was responsible for increasing the size of the college’s
web site by adding many web pages to the pre-existing site.
What is a Web Page?
A web page is a file containing information that is linked to additional files
containing information of the same subject in an effort to connect this
information efficiently and easily. This file is a text based file which
provides information to the user. Additional information is attached via the
in-line links, commonly referred to as “hypertext”. To increase interest
levels most web pages contain images and little animated graphics. The web
page was indirectly invented by Berners-Lee who was a computer programmer with
a brilliant mind and a bad memory. Berners-Lee created “a memory
substitute” program called Enquire that could randomly link information to
the words found in certain files. This was his way of easily informing readers
about the content of data files.
It can be thought of as a reader who approaches an unfamiliar
word in the literature. All the reader has to do is “click” on the
unfamiliar word and the definition instantly appears in.
These random connections are the heart of the world wide web, which became very
popular ten years after the introduction of Berners-Lee’s program and is
exponentially growing five years later. People from all aroung the world use
the internet as a gateway to information. Businessmen, and women who are out
to advertise their products and services........Students, interested in
learning and keeping in touch........Curious-minded citizens, who are eager to
learn daily.......Governments, that need to broadcast
information.......Communications experts, who are gungho about breaking
barriers........engineers, who love to analyze every breakthrough in
technology............Doctors, who need to keep up-to-date in medical practices
and new ideas........Religious institutes, that need to increase public
awareness......and clubs, who are looking for new members and fellowship with
other clubs.
What is the Difference Between the Internet and The World Wide Web?
The WWW consists of web pages linked together in an unending web that
is a model of out brains. It is an information
