29 years ago today
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Dec. 5, 2024
Twenty-nine years ago today, on Dec. 5, 1995, I created my first
website at a little internet cafe in Seattle. This was before
GeoCities or AngelFire was really a thing (or at least I was not
aware of those), and the web hosting came with my personal UNIX
shell account from the internet cafe, which I could use to log in
from there, as well as from places like Seattle Public Library
using Telnet on its VT-100 dumb terminals.
That meant I for the most part had to manually type in HTML into
the shell using the PICO text editor (which was proprietary
software from the University of Washington, later emulated by the
open-source NANO editor). Or, I could FTP from my college computer
lab.
It was also the day when I got my first email address.
Everything was quite primitive then, and the internet was still
very much of a niche. America Online and CompuServe were more
"mainstream" (and at the time neither AOL nor CSi provided easy
access to the internet). There were still people who exclusively
used a dial-up BBS, too.
It's hard to believe now, but people used to openly share their
email addresses back then, and it was quite acceptable to email a
total stranger. (Spam wasn't really a thing yet.) Then there was
IRC. Overall, everything felt more slow-paced and quieter.
Even "e-commerce" wasn't quite a thing then: some companies began
setting up websites where one would request a printed catalog by
mail, or get a phone number to call in an order. Very few did
actually take credit card payments online. (And it may be
surprising now, but it was also still quite common to send credit
card numbers over unencrypted email!)
Amazon.com was just starting up. They had an office on Second
Avenue in downtown Seattle. At the time I could mail them a check
or even drop by at the office and leave a payment in person. It
claimed to be the "World's Biggest Bookstore" and got sued by
Barnes & Noble (B&N argued that Amazon was not a bookstore but just
a "broker").
=>
https://web.archive.org/web/19970625192817/http://speakeasy.org/
Speakeasy Cafe (the oldest available archive, dated June 25, 1997
-- by then I moved out of Seattle.)
=>
https://web.archive.org/web/19970625193729/http://speakeasy.org/speakeasy/cafe/menu.html
Menu
