Technology

# I remember

January 20, 2019 , 3 minutes to read

In 2019 I’m “celebrating” twenty years since I published my first website. It was ugly, it was heavy and it was built completely with Microsoft FrontPage .

I’m putting together a list of memories from my early days on the web—late 90s and early 2000s. Smile and nod if you encountered any number of these:

- A way to locally simulate modem loading speeds was to open the website from a 3.5’ floppy disk. The data reading speed was comparable, and frankly, both devices were just as noisy.
- There was virtually no support for Unicode. To publish websites with Polish diacritics we had to use the `ISO-8859-2` encoding. Granted, some (primarily U.S.) websites remain in this era to this day and offer no charset support beyond `ASCII` .
- Laying out elements on a website involved tables—lots of them. whole HTML code was downloaded.
- Major, free email providers routinely offered 1-2MB of storage. When GMail launched on April 1, 2004, offering 1GB of free storage (by which time other services offered around 15-25MB), most people thought it was an April Fool’s joke.

This post is a work in progress and will remain so, likely indefinitely. Whenever I remember some quirky way of doing things from the past, I will update it with new content.

Read another post?