To actually host the page, ~10 old me didn't know what to do. But a relative in Denmark had suddenly become the "webmaster" for her local government, and gotten to learn some stuff.

Remotely teaching me ftp or ssh was out of the question, but I got tipped about Tripod/Lycos. They had an online interface where I could upload a file! And then later she showed me how to apply for dot.tk and have my very own domain. Very cool 8)

Was a bit dormant, though. What more could I do than adding some texts and under construction gifs?

Then the Harry Potter craze hit. Lots of people made cool websites, and I wanted to join! To up the game, me and a friend made stuff in FrontPage. Still manually uploading one and one file through Tripod's web interface. I could do so much more than the little HTML I had managed to do in Notepad! Then I later got to spend a day shadowing a professional web developer, and she gave me the CD for the previous version of Dreamweaver! First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.

As many others, my Harry Potter page was a "school" where people could do stuff and earn house points. But not knowing programming, everything was static and I had to manually edit and reupload files. Luckily only like two friends used the page hehe. But other HP pages were dynamic! How? I had to learn PHP!

-

As an aside, it's curious how many of those professionals I interacted with the first years were women. Companies/govagencies felt they needed a presence, but didn't care much, and just gave the task to someone else already doing communication/admin work. And they learned on the job and suddenly became the first experts here.

I think this is more or less an argument in favor of tools that are helpful to the developer, like feature rich IDEs with parameter hints and autocomplete/suggestions, text editors with plugins that give you a similar experience or even a little bit of AI help.

Some people have the attitude that you might want to learn a language/framework with just a text editor to know the internals, but I think that if you want results fast and focus on solving problems (getting the site up and running) quickly, then tools like these are invaluable!

By the middle of the nineties I had to write-protect everything and leave only an "incoming" directory with write access, because some jerk deleted everything just for fun.

By the end of the nineties I was fed up with everyone trying to use my "incoming" directory for storing warez/pr0n so I gave up (yes I tried setting it write-only but what's the point ?). Well, it was fine while it lasted, the community of people on the internet definitely changed in a few years, and it didn't get any better in the following decades.

  > I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it
  > is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.

  blink {
   text-decoration: blink;
   animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
   -webkit-animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
  }
  @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }
  @-webkit-keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }

How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?

Likewise, IRC was also created by a fellow finn back in 1988, Jarkko "Wiz" Oikarinen, at the University of Oulu.

i haven't heard anything about it since. it was just a hobby. and it wasn't very useful anyways because it only supported AT harddisks and the license didn't allow commercial use.

It did spread very quickly, as the issue it solves was quite obvious and there weren't a lot of competing solutions. So it's pretty possible that that was the actual tech used.