When I set up my first home page in 1994, the Internet was a very different place. Most people who had graphical web access (most people still didn’t) were browsing with NCSA Mosaic. There were no colours, tables, frames, or any kind of formatting really, available through HTML. We didn’t even have Java, JavaScript, or plugins. There were fewer than 10,000 web sites compared to today’s 40 million. Netscape was a brand new company, still called Mosaic Communications, and their first browser was still in beta at verion 0.90. Apache’s first public version was months away. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Amazon, eBay, Excite, Deja News, Quake, Verisign, and ICANN didn’t exist. DEC and BBN did. Microsoft was still denying that the Internet existed at all. Windows users had to use third-party software to connect to the Internet. The essential Internet applications — Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, and Eudora — all fit onto a single floppy disk with room to spare. Windows 95 was still a year away. Bill Gates’s net worth was still counted in single-digit billions. The September that Never Ended was only a year old. Internex Online was still the biggest ISP in Toronto. I was still six months away from my first Internet-related job. There was no junk email. “Chat” meant IRC and IRC meant EFNet. You could still find useful Gopher servers. There was no such thing as a banner ad. High-speed access came courtesy of a 28.8k modem.
Awards
Two previous incarnations of this site have won prestigious design awards: the original Dodgeville was awarded Mirsky’s Worst of the Web (now defunct) on August 23, 1995, and nominated (and disqualified) in the Lame Home Page Contest (also defunct) for September 1995.
Dodgeville’s mean-spirited successor, located for a year at my old loner.com domain, was awarded the (non-Mirsky) Worst of the Web on June 18, 1998 and nominated for Cruel Site of the Day around the same time.
Dodgeville Mark IV hasn’t won any awards yet, and I don’t expect it to. It was an honour just to be nominated.
