By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
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").
Speakeasy Cafe (the oldest available archive, dated June 25, 1997 -- by then I moved out of Seattle.)
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