The hyperlink next to the left-arrow button, above, that used to say Home, has been replaced with Gallery, because times have changed. Phototelegrapher is now where visitors are invited to enter my website. What was for many years my home page has become an inactive place for storing past images, such as the sunset taken with my first digital camera. Please stroll around this early collection, if you have not yet done so. For the next few posts, I plan to feature several pictures that have become my all-time favorites.

The date is a little fuzzy, but the World Wide Web made a remarkable transition from text-only to images around 1994. One of the first servers that became available for public use was Prodigy, which also offered a simple browser. I quickly joined and created a Web page with the same logo I was using on my letterhead. A friend at a nearby academic institution allowed me to place a few images on his server, because Prodigy was only accepting text through its limited interface.

Over the next year, the Web grew explosively, and servers with direct FTP access became available, and my Web activities increased rapidly. However, my home page continued to follow its original format, and has done so even to this day.

The files for my home page for May 11, 1996, remain, and I thought it would be interesting to post it once again for display with modern browsers. Here, give this a try.

My Early Home Page

Back then, everybody had 640x480 monitors, so you will have to reduce your width to make all the formatting correct. Images within the page displayed as dithered colors, so, to see all 256 true colors, you had to download into a better viewer. Also, most people were using 1200-bps modems, so each image was made an optional download with a warning about file size. Compression was not generally used. I felt my little portrait was OK to include on the page, because it was only 9 kilobytes.

Few of the links are active anymore, except for the three "FeaturedFoto" images, and what you see is the state of the art for that day. There were no digital still cameras, yet, so I used a video camera and a device called Snappy that made GIF files from individual video frames. My portrait was scanned with a hand-held scanner dragged across a paper print. That's all we had 11 years ago.

Three lines of the original HTML code have been deleted. When the Web first became popular, almost everyone included his street address and telephone number. The Internet was then friendly and safe.