A Walk Through the Wild Early Days of the Web
Every now and then I’m reminded just how far we’ve come in the world of computing, coding, and web design. And I’ll be honest, there’s a strange kind of joy in looking back at the things we had to deal with in those early days… the quirks, the limitations, the workarounds, the triumphs that only someone who lived through that era can truly appreciate.
I started coding HTML back when HTML itself had barely taken its first breath. Around 1994, I was sitting in front of a clunky old Windows machine, writing code in plain old Notepad. No colour coding, no autocomplete, not even a hint of indentation or syntax highlighting. Just raw text, raw markup, and a whole lot of trial and error. I’d type out a page, save it as .html, open it in the browser, see everything misaligned, go back to Notepad, fix a tag, save again, refresh again, rinse and repeat. It was a ritual.
And you know what… I loved it.
Later, there were those early HTML editors, strange little pieces of software that promised WYSIWYG design but never quite delivered. Expensive, clunky, Australian-made things that felt almost experimental. Then Microsoft came crashing onto the scene with FrontPage.
Ah yes, FrontPage.
Anyone who used it will either laugh or cringe. It generated markup so chaotic it could frighten small animals. But for its time, it felt miraculous. Drag and drop. Visual layout. A brave new world, even if the code it produced looked like spaghetti written by an exhausted robot.
Then came Macromedia… Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks. I bought the whole suite and thought I was unstoppable. Flash intros were all the rage. Animated GIFs were cutting edge. Websites made swooshing sounds because someone decided that was cool.
This was the digital frontier.
But one of the biggest advantages of living through all of that was the experience it gave you. The intuition. The sense of the machine. And that experience paid off more times than I can count.
I remember a young developer working for me back then. Bright, talented, full of enthusiasm, and absolutely convinced that long filenames were the future. Windows 95 had just normalised long filenames, and he insisted we should all move on from the old DOS convention of eight characters for the filename and three for the extension.
I told him, gently, that I preferred to stick to the 8.3 rule as the default. Not because I was stuck in the past, but because we weren’t living in a fully future-proof world yet. I warned him it was going to come back and bite him. He rolled his eyes in the way only a young developer can. That silent message… “Come on David, don’t be old fashioned.”
It took only a few weeks for reality to catch up with him.
Problem number one… his Word document printed as complete gobbledygook. Just random symbols, as if the file had been encrypted by aliens. I asked him the filename. Sure enough… twelve characters long with a chunky extension. I told him to rename it to something short. And like magic, the printer obeyed.
Problem number two… we were using the Wise installation compiler. Every time he tried to build an installer, it failed. Again I asked the filename. Again it was long. Again I said… shorten it. And the installer built perfectly.
Two lessons in quick succession. Experience versus enthusiasm. He learned something important that week. I didn’t have to say a word. He got it.
And then there were the other joys of that era. The infamous 256-colour palette. People today don’t realise how many hours were spent wrestling with colour banding and palette corruption. If you didn’t lock in your palette, or if you used a single colour that wasn’t part of the system’s approved list, your image would load with the wrong shades, turning skin tones into radioactive orange and ocean water into something resembling pea soup.
Then there was the art of slicing images for the web. You couldn’t just upload a big JPEG back then. Dial-up modems were crawling along at 1200 baud, maybe 2400 if you were lucky. If a page took more than ten seconds to load, the visitor assumed their computer had crashed. So we chopped big images into tiles. Tiny little rectangles, each one loading quicker than the last, so the image would reveal itself bit by bit, line by line.
When you saw your image slowly appear in blocks, you felt like a magician. Today, people get impatient if a full-screen 4K image takes more than a heartbeat.
Fast forward to now. WordPress. GeneratePress. Hooks. Shortcodes. Plugins like CatList. AI-assisted workflows. Entire sites built from the back end. No manual FTP uploads unless you feel nostalgic. What once took weeks of coding and testing now takes minutes. And somehow, despite all the modern conveniences, I still find myself leaning on instincts that were shaped in those early, chaotic years.
That’s the funny thing about experience. The youngsters think you’re being stubborn or old school. But you know the truth. You’ve seen what happens when systems break. You’ve seen what fails silently. You’ve learned the hard lessons. And those lessons stay with you.
Yes, we’ve come a long way. And I’ve been lucky enough to travel that entire road, from the dawn of the web to the AI-powered present. And maybe that’s why I enjoy all this so much today. Because I can see the whole picture. I can appreciate the elegance of what we have now, because I remember how rough and raw it all used to be.
And honestly… I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.