Fortune City for me, eventually convinced my dad to pay for a boxed copy of Macromedia Flash 4 and a real hosting account with front page extensions. I think it even did PHP, which led to lots of messing around with every PHP CMS under the sun, including a lot of time with PHP-Nuke.

I never really figured that every hour spent messing with all that would translate into so much more value than any of my school work. The scope of our computer courses at school was basically touch typing and MS Office 97/98.

Wow, I did about the same thing. Took me about 23 years to go from using Frontpage to put rotating, flaming skulls any page I made to my job at Apple.

Man, those gifs were the best.

I feel like I went on a similar journey to you. I wouldn't be where I am today without that beginning.

I would love to hear the story of those who created those iconic gifs--the flaming skull and the twinkling Christmas tree stick out the most to me.

JS snow was top-tier, as were flashing holiday lights with transparent backgrounds around the site for the holidays. Bonus points for midi choons.

It was truly a lit time when you could control browser window size and position on the desktop from within JS, even eject the CD ROM! Free cup holder JS jokes freaked out the older folks. So good.