April 11, 2005

• A Short History Of The Web
  (The writer plumbs the depths of the digital soul. Rides the rails of the virtual railroad. Interacts with his computer on a personal level.)                                                 
  by Michael F. Nyiri

  
  

  The webpage from whence this essay comes was originally written in 1999, and updated: June 2001. The page is on the original ComputerBS section of  AllThingsMIke which is Located here.  I  never “finished” it and some of the travails of the “early internet” are somewhat humorous. The original essay had some rather offensive sections I have edited out of the Xanga-friendly version. This essay “ends” with a reference to “The Site Fights”, which constituted another complete blog entry last year, the text of which were the remaining two chapters of  the essay you are about to read. I won’t post a link to the Site Fights entry. If anyone really wants to read it, let me know in comments and I’ll send you the link via email or a comment on your blog. This is long enough as I present it here, I would think. Astute readers will notice that my “grand plan” was pretty much spelled out from the beginning when I first got “online”. Now, six years later, I have my “ultimate personal website” of which WhenWordsCollide, this very blog, is a major part. So let’s turn the Wayback Machine to 1999, late in the last century. MFN 4/11/05

  
  

  
  The Idea Germinates

  
  

  The web hasn’t really “arrived” yet. Some creative digital types out there, like yours truly, have seen the potential for the digital arts. I know there are a lot of digital art sites out there, and with each new processor, or peripheral, it seems there are a bevy of artistic applications being hatched. When the germ for this essay came to me, I fired up the computer (still my 166MHz baby, crashing as I write) , connected to the internet, checked my e-mail on both my computer and a couple of servers, logged on to my website, and began the laborious artistic process (hitting a few buttons, manuevering the mouse, rebooting) that brought me to this page, and the digital equivalent of writer’s block. This isn’t a block, now mind you. Faced with the word processing power and the magic of fonts, I always seem to set a few words (too many) down. And maybe not ever get to the point, which, as was my point, was lost in the process of getting here in the first place. Well, that was the dose of  ComputerBS for this essay, and now I shall begin.
  How shall I begin?
  Three years ago (1996) I learned to operate the windows operating system. I learned what a window was, and how important it was to close a few every now and then. I bought my home computer, a monster with 166MHz of RAM, a 2.99 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive. I hooked up to the internet with AT&T. I plunged head first into the magnificent early internet world of 1997. The first thing I learned was how important it was to catalogue the links to the places I wanted to go. Sort of like having the digital Thomas Guide. At first everything got tagged. I used Explorer then, although I downloaded Communicator off the web. Some page I visited said I needed it to view their website. It sat unused on my computer till Bill Gates destroyed my Explorer 5.0 beta software, and instead of downloading a new Explorer, I opened the Netscape already on my computer. The tag in Explorer is Favorites. My Favorite list became topheavy. My e-mail folders multiplied. I was ready after only two weeks to join an internet community.

  
  

  Stop the Globe, I Want to Get Off

  
  

  The first internet community I joined was the Globe. I didn’t particularly like the aspect that built the Globe and other communities like it, which was and is, of course, chat. For some reason , as a writer I guess, who is used to seeing his words fly from the ether to the word processing screen as he forms them in his mind, I just never cottoned to the idea of people typing to each other. If they want to talk, there’s a telephone for that, and it was invented more than a hundred years ago.
  I did put up a personal ad, and formulated my profile (the first of what now seems like thousands of times.) I even had a “web page” although in those heady early days of internet connection if you didn’t know how to write HTML then you had your name and age and that was about it. They’ve come a long way since then.
  My ad was answered immediately, which thrilled and delighted me. That it was a lonely gal in Panama didn’t faze me in the least, as I  began composing the most beautiful e-mails that the world has seen. You see, I needed the internet as an extension of my artistic personality, and the simple fact that I could “reach anyone” through the kismet-like aura of the Globe-al internet community, interested me and filled my artistic sensibility. That writing these e-mails to someone in Panama whose number one concern in life was to hook up with some American man and become an American citizen in the process (then conceiveably dump the man) was a foreign concept to me. At least as foreign as Panama. I remember my first e-mail was to this golddigger. Soon, I was answering more e-mails, and writing more ads. I still wasn’t into chat, and left the rooms alone, but I was turned on to the ICQ. (I’ll never forget the request: Do you have the ICQ? I thought maybe it was a disease.) The gal who asked was a dog breeder in Kentucky. She and I wrote many e-mails, which is my forte, but she seemed to want more. She needed instant communication, and I dutifully installed the ICQ. This was probably the biggest mistake I had made.
  ICQ allows one to send “instant messages” to another user on their “list” if that person is on the internet. The first “session” was rather fun. I had a three hour “conversation” on the ICQ. Since both parties are typing, any mistakes each makes is visible to the other, as a sort of digital freudian slip. The “conversation” was very superficial. There is no time to think about what one writes, so you just try to be clever. No one says anything of much import, and it is probably this way in the chat rooms as well.
  As I mentioned, I didn’t then, and do not now use chat rooms. I am sure these are very important for some people, but seem like a waste of time to me. My initial use of ICQ soured as I realized the other party who turned me on to the program never wanted to leave me alone. Within a few months of starting my internet adventure, I found that there are somewhat lonely people out there in the ether who view webconnections as their friends and family, and get upset and/or depressed when someone with a life tends to want to ignore them after getting a few million e-mails, and hours spent on the ICQ.
  I unplugged that sucker soon after I installed it. I have used this “service” of instant messaging recently, and still cannot fathom the process. It is a poor substitute for the phone, which, of course, was invented over a hundred years ago.

  
  

  From E-mail to Phonesex in three easy steps:

  
  

  The Globe community, sans chat rooms, gave me the opportunity to sample the forlorn and lonely lives of  certain women sitting at the computer hoping for a brief respite from their pitiful lives through cybersex.
  I went through three or four of these cyber romances. Back then, in the paleolihic age of 1997, sending photos through the internet wasn’t as easy as it is today. I tried for hours to zip a file of photos to send to the Kentucky dog breeder, and more hours to open her zipped photos. The idea was rapturous, but hardly commonplace. I began a heated email exchange with Gal45, who used to visit a website called Candy’s Funhouse. It wasn’t a porn site. I sampled those as well. The type of interplay this gal liked was of a purely sexual nature. Of course being celibate, these kinds of things were least on my mind, but I yearned for the promise of romance and meeting people on the internet.
  Gal45 and I went from our heated email exchanges to talking on the phone relatively easily, and I later found out that she had cyberbeaus all over the country. When I finally saw her photo (which she didn’t want to send me, and was eventually sent through ‘snail mail’) I saw why. The poor gal was certainly no looker. I’m not the most handsome guy in the world myself, you understand, but the mental picture I formed while I had my manhood in hand couldn’t have been more from the reality, and I was somewhat devastated. Needless to say, this one , too, passed.
  This was my introduction to webpresences, purely through e-mail, and those dreadful instant messengers. After only a few months as a webpresence, I began shrinking away from the medium. I went back to watching my bigscreen television.

  
  

  Playing with the “New Toy”

  
  

  The internet wasn’t simply a way to communicate with others, like the telephone. It proved to be a vast repository of relevant and irrelevant information, and a place to share one’s photos, philosophies, and  foibles. At  first, I bowed in awe to it’s presence in my life. I had wanted to go “on-line” since at least the early nineties, and by 1998, I’d already been burned by the internet fires.
  “Instant communication” first fascinated, then apalled me. The number of people who needed to “get in touch”, “stay in touch”, and “be forever connected” seemed to grow. by leaps and bounds. I figured that, as the perennial “failed writer”, my dream of transposing some 400 or 500 poems which had been gathering dust for years into the online universe was a challenging dream. Perhaps the readership and accolades for which I had searched back in high school when I “passed the poetry” around would materialize in an ever spiraling internet community of “fans” as soon as I figured out a way to put all those poems on the internet.
  The Globe community had “websites” for their members, and I modified my “homepage” to reflect my interests, and to provide future links to an otherwise lofty pipedream, that of “creating the internet webpresence.” Already I could see that any 12 year old kid seemed to be able to create a few readable and eyecatching pages. How long before I would understand and be able to write in the HTML code? I began at this phase in my internet life to buy many computer programs, to learn the “building blocks” of webdesign, and to put my dream of worldwide interconnectivity on the fast track.
  I grew disgusted with the email aspect of communication.
  As mentioned, most, if not all, of the connections I had made up to this point were with forlorn types who seemed to need instantaneous bonding. My emails, small literary masterpieces, would never be read by the masses, and their intended recipients certainly didn’t ponder their merits, but probably deleted them as soon as they deciphered the few words they understood.
  The programs I purchased included Print Shop, which allowed clip-art layering, and Dazzle video editing software, for eventually “publishing” videos on the web. I read voraciously about Frontpage, and other web authoring tools, and, as with every piece of information in the age of same, felt bombarded with too much. Each program was like another, each feature was upgraded by the month. My computer was “ancient”. My dreams were unfulfilled. My email list shrunk as I got sick of replying to ciphers.
  I needed to build myself a website, and the Globe was of no consequence in this matter. I set my “sites” on two communites which allowed webmasters both expeienced and woefully naive to actually put a few pages up and view them in scant minutes, and with a few hours patience with their editing software, one could actually create what amounted to the digital equivalent of artistic content. The neat thing about it, was, unlike email, and connectivity on a “personal” level, the website would exist in the ether of internet space, would have it’s own specific “address” and could be “listed” in directories which would generate traffic, and eventually give my the readership for my poetry that I had always craved. I could conceiveably post my videos, and expound upon the panthiestic philosophies with which I had bored friends and aquaintences for years.
  The two “hosting” services I chose to register for were GeoCities and Homestead. Unlike the Globe, these services were website based rather than chat based, and they offered editors with which to create the very sites you could post on their service. I experimented with both editors, and although I knew no HTML, I could drag, drop, cut and paste, and had learned “layering” from the three or four print shop programs in my computer program library. I fiddled around with GeoCities, and couldn’t find satisfaction with the program. Although I will read “manuals” and access “help” in computer programs, I will admit I usually learn everything by actively “jumping in and getting wet” and the GeoCities builder was a bit of a pain.
  On the other hand, the Homestead service seemed like Jesus Christ had come back and written the code to give everyone his own soapbox and/or Mt. Sinai for expounding their beliefs. At first I was awash in confusion. Did I want to duplicate the same pages on both services? How would I know whether I had everything in the proper “folder”? GeoCities had made the process somewhat difficult, but Homestead offered the “SiteBuilder” editing software, accessible either online or in a free downloadable version.
  It resembled one of those print shop programs, even down to the layering aspect, and it proved to be an immensly satisfying muse, causing me to create my website: AllThingsMike, the key to my internet personality, and the most important project I had thus far embarked upon along the information superhighway.

  
  

  I stake my claim on the “Homestead”

  
  

  I can easily remember the impetus for my website. On my birthday in 1999 I would turn 46 years old. As anyone in my generation can tell you, we never even pondered that we would get this old, we saw ourselves perpetually in college, forever young, and can’t bear to think that a lot of the things we enjoy today didn’t even exist when we were in college.
  Like the internet.
  I had given up on email, and never could get into chat.
  I felt that in order to “establish an internet webpresence” I would build a “comprehensive personal website”, one which would bear witness to my observations about life, my philosophies about religion and spirituality, and which would give me a “virutal space” for my writing and poetry.
  For large chunks of my life, I proclaimed that “the poetry is gone”. Now I felt, with a renewed vigor, that I would be “born again” in the virtual world, and my “internet personality” would be so interesting and wonderful, that millions of people would stop by, “read me like a book”, and send an email or two declaring that I had touched a nerve.
  Since GeoCities didn’t seem to have the right tools, and the Homestead editor was not only easy to use, but offered lots of little “elements” to make pages interesting, I got to work, and on my birthday, 1999, over two years ago, I created the first edition of AllThingsMike. I developed the same “departments” which now adorn the site. The graphics were much primitive, being limited to the background sets and clip art which were offered., but as I purchased more “webspecific” computer programs, and as I learned more and more from not only my mistakes but the mistakes made by people who also designed websites with the software, I turned to the creation of  “my website” as a tangible goal, and I worked hard.
  For years, inactivity and moldering creativity caused me to think my life was simply slipping away. Now I felt renewed. The first webpage was actually created on Netscape composer, and is merely a transcript of the poem I wrote to announce my intentions in cyberspace.
  It is called bornagain.
  The wheels began turning and within a few months, I had constructed a website.
  The little elements feature in the editor allowed me to add hit counters and guest books, and the very fact that this little corner of cyber space existed with my handle on it thrilled me greatly. Now I had to cultivate a readership, and list my fledgeling website with the great “search engines.”
  If somebody wanted to read me like a book, I would make it relatively easy.

  
  

  “Visit my Site”

  
  

  For the first few months after beginning my website, I learned much from visiting the sites of  other folk who used the Homestead Editor. I learned that there were a lot of people who dragged and dropped any old “element” from the Homestead library onto their pages. They thought this was flashy, and served no other purpose, as far as I was concerned, other than showing the world that they possessed no talents whatsoever, and were substituting these “elements” for content.
  I certainly didn’t really know what I was doing, but with slightly more than the twelve or thirteen years experience which most “webmasters” seemed to bring to the table, I did know that the most important thing on my fledgling website was to be the content. Over thirty years of unpublished poetry would eventually find itself on my site, along with some images created in my Print Shop programs, and hopefully, in the near future, my expanding video library of MikeVideos.
  My site helped me exercise some latent creativity which hadn’t been active since at least 1992. That was the year I moved in with Pat and her kids. I think after those three years passed, and even well into 1995 or 96, I had ceased needing to create. I simply watched video or read. I felt I was “resting” after the strains of the relationship ended. .Using the renewed vigor with which I felt after putting up the first pages of my fledgeling site, I delved wholeheartedly into replicating my “life in words.”
  Each day in the beginning, I wrote at a rapid and happy clip. I felt, as I have always felt, and will probably always feel,  that by simply by writing poetry and “essays” through out the years, eventually I would  discover and examine the very humanity with which I had always sought, and through my words, people would discover truths about themselves, and eventually the universal truths which I believe would be understood by all. I wrote and I posted. Posted, and wrote. My dream would slowly come true.

  
  

  Now I had to interest people into “dropping by”.
  Within two months, by July of 1999, I had passed around flyers at work, and had listed with the Homestead service. Homestead really didn’t have a community like the Globe.The website was listed in what was essentially a phone book. I have never received hits by lisiting with Homestead.  I tried to list with Yahoo, but found out relatively early on that it was almost impossible to list with them. I added my website’s URL to my “webpage” at the Globe.
  Every vendor and customer at work received an invitation to “visit my site.” To this day, that’s usually the second or third thing that comes out of my mouth.
  I had begun to duplicate my ideas online, and as the months passed after the initial pages had been constructed, more poetry, photography, and “essays” found their way  on the sites, and I kept adding sites.
  Email only mattered now in the context of whether people would comment on the “electronic persona.” I positioned Guestbooks on the pages, and hit counters, so I could gauge my popularity. At the same time, I scoured Homestead’s sections for hints and advice on how to make my site seen, and I figured that as soon as people started visiting, and when they truly understood what they were witnessing, then I would probably finally gain those fleeting fifteen minutes of fame, or better yet, become a celebrated wit and raconteur..
  My first “fan” email came from one of those 15 year old girls who write poetry. There were probably a few thousand of them in 1999 (each with the requisite website) and today the number has probably quadrupled. I read her poetry, and viewed her artwork and photography, and I felt good. She was young enough to be my granddaughter. I made sure all emails to her were composed with the thought in mind that her parents could be standing over her reading my words.
  I talked about my new email friend with coworkers. The consensus was to drop this hot potato. But I kept the correspondence with my “fan” until she discovered boys, and stopped writing poetry.
  I attended my high school’s fiftieth anniversary in October 1999. I made up little “business cards” like we passed around at both the graduation and the 10 year reunion. They were my cloud blue background with AllThingsMike emblazoned on it. I handed them all out. “Visit my website.” I screamed to the masses.
  Now all I had to do was wait for the masses to visit.
  Then my genius would be unloosed on the world.
  My bigscreen tv now sat in the other room only watched by my roommate, as I spent every waking hour with my websites. Besides my 15 year old fan, I did pick up some interest and some hits merely by giving the URL to everyone I knew or met. On the internet though, I couldn’t seem to find the right community of interested parties, and although I “listed my URL” with countless search engines, I couldn’t get the listings to appear.
  Homestead had a section called “promote my site”. One of their suggestions was to “win awards” by entering my website in the site fights., a place where, it was told, I would collect many new friends and readers.

  • 7:20 pm
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