"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.
"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet."
I was in my teens and discovered the Internet via Netscape for the first time. Then I kept asking a next door neighour at a computer, "How did you do that?". "How is this possible?"... I learnt about this file transfering software called WS-FTP, a free online storage facility called Geocities, a graphics package called PaintShop Pro, the interrupter language called HTML and how it all pieces together.
Thankfully he kept showing me and after a week or so of playing around, I managed to make some mad looking site. Unfortunately I have no picture of my very first site. Yet I will describe it as like a hobby show off site, documenting my favourite toon show ("The Simpsons") and my newly played fav game "Hexen".
It took me an age to get used to using "Paint Shop Pro", I am still amazed I have not turned pro into graphics. Yet I have managed to learn the basics, slicing, making nice effects, feather touching, simple smudging techniques, even made an animation clip of a film credit from scratch (Took me a while).
Whilst taking up a GNVQ course in Intermediate in IT at Henley College and with no qualifications under my belt, only armed with a Geocities site... At the age of 14 I landed my first part-time Web Designer job at Uxbridge college and helped them create their first site ever.
Sounds amazing doesn't it? Really my father was the "IT manager" for Uxbridge College at the time, and after my father initially starting up the web server technologies on their campuses, he was wondering who to give the 'Web Designer' job to, at the time he only knew me who had the skills to create websites, so it saved him having to look for long and concentrate on other important priorities.
After a year of working with them, Uxbridge College, took control and I got made redundant :( They thought they could save money by having some lecturer who only just recently learnt HTML and thought they be able to save some money....The site got shut down for a very long period as it was too complex to look after.
Why was it complex? The Website boasted off it's latest prospectus and it had a multi-tier arrangement as at the time, computers could not handle much rendering (3 Frames worth of pages was stretching it) so I was asked to create a setup system to make the site look even more basic with the user wished it to speed up the browsing. Yes you can safely say I used JavaScript programming langauge in which to create the system.
The screen-shot of the the desktop showed I used Windows95 and never knew of this so called software Open source at the time and only saw and heard of meir hints of Unix [/me blushes]
Further Reading
BBC : Yahoo Pulls Plug on Geocities
Google Finance : YHOO
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