Baby steps and the birth of a monster
Grandson was here yesterday.
“Grandad, Mam told me you once made a famous website?”
This puzzled me for a bit as I have made dozens of websites. Could he be referring to this one, and if so, why the past tense?
Then I remembered! He meant my very first site when I knew sweet damn all about websites and the whole Interwebs was in its infancy and not even out of the virtual maternity hospital.
At the time one of my jobs was to install software on the PCs in RTE so that people could access this new wondrous invention. First I would install the IP stack and then install Netscape Navigator Gold. One of the very first questions that would be thrown at me was did I have a list of good websites they could use.
I pondered upon this question when I had an idea. At the time, Netscape used a file called bookmarks.html. This contained all the sites a user had bookmarked. It crossed my mind that I could edit this file and add a list of common sites such as HotBot, Dogpile and the Irish Times [Google hadn’t been invented yet]. So when I did my installations I included my edited file which instantly gave them most of what they wanted. As I did my rounds I also got suggestions for other sites to add to my little file.
It was a bit of a pain having to install this file and it crossed my mind that it would be easier if I could put the file somewhere on RTE’s internal Intranet site and people could then just link to it. I approached the boss with the suggestion. He told me to fuck off, that no one was allowed stick their personal stuff on the Intranet. Typical RTE!
A friend in Engineering had a little sideline where he had gotten himself a web server. He heard my dilemma and suggested I put my file on his server, that all I needed was a name for the embryonic website. Irish Lynx was born!
I did a bit of home tutorials on the wonders of web sites and how to write them and soon had an actual website with an Index and pages of categorised links. I even managed to add some images to make it more professional looking. I had created my first site!
Over the months, the site grew into quite a large repository of several thousand links. As the site was public, people outside RTE started using it too. It became very popular. The mainstream media began to take notice.
Irish Lynx is a portal site of, well, Irish links (the more obvious domain name of www.irishlinks.com was already taken by a site that has nothing to do with Irish interests). It was initially set up two years ago with the idea that if you have, or know of, a good site, share it. This is one of the basic philosophies of the Internet, and it’s good to see this ideal being so well honoured here. Up-to-date, accurate, a great resource with graphics and colour kept to a minimum, it’s easy to use.
The Irish Times Oct 3rd 2000
The site became very difficult to edit as every entry had to be put into several files. What I needed was a programme to do it for me. I knew nothing about databases so I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet to contain the information. I then created a Visual Basic Macro to run it. I would add the new links to the spreadsheet and then press “Compile”. The macro would then delete the old files and create new ones from scratch. It was cumbersome but it worked. At this point the site contained tens of thousands of links.
I was approached by management. They wanted the site. They didn’t say why. I told them to bugger off.
They said the site was theirs as it had been written on company time and I that had to hand it over.
I told them to bugger off and that the site had been written on my own time at home.
They said they owned the “Intellectual Property Rights” to anything and everything produced by a staff member regardless of when or where it was created. This sounded very suspicious as they could claim ownership of everything I had ever written since I started working there [including shopping lists?]. I didn’t quite believe them.
I told them to bugger off.
Stalemate.
Eventually they backed down and offered to buy the site. A price was agreed and paid.
They killed the site.
To this day, I don’t understand why they did what they did. The site just vanished. No notice or apologies to the public who were using the site. They let the domain lapse and it has since been owned by various people linking to sites that have fuck all to do with Ireland or indeed the Lynx.
The site wouldn’t stand a chance now. Google and their ilk have seen the end of portals and made them redundant.
It’s funny, but up until yesterday I had forgotten all about Irish Lynx.
Fascinating – Genesis of the Blogmonsters (us).
Little did I realise the journey upon which I was embarking [which continues to this day].
A little nugget for the technically minded – the entire site consisted of HTML files. No such thing as MySQL, PHP or CSS in those days.
Shame, I was just preparing to look it up!
There’s no point. It’s currently being used by some Home Brew Kit crowd who are presumably hoping the domain name carries some historical weight. The only place Irish Lynx now exists is as a ghost in the Wayback Machine.
I don’t recall you ever mentioning Irish Lynx!
I thought you were going to talk about Silver Haired Internet Technology!
That’s probably because I had forgotten about it. SHIT came later, after all that excitement.
Good god, I had forgotten all about Dogpile but now that you mentioned it, it brought back all sorts of ancient memories of the search engines back then. Like AltaVista, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, and the like. Also the early browsers I banged through including a new upstart browser called Mozilla Phoenix which quickly had to change it’s name if you recall. Of course I had broken into “PCs” back before I even knew of a thing called “The Internet” which was then a text-only thing. A fair ways before the “web” was thought up. First was on an Apple IIE (good ol’ Apple Basic) then went on to MS DOS 2.0 (just plain Basic).
So thanks for the memories–I think.
Memories for me too of being at the ‘bleeding edge’, just a decade or so earlier.
In the 1980s I managed a team designing and implementing the then-radical idea of a corporate network of PCs, not dumb mainframe terminals. We had to invent all the management process stuff like usernames, passwords, permissions, support systems, back-up etc. because no-one had done it before. We developed forms of file-transfer to enable collaborative working, which morphed into an early form of e-mail.
In fact we also invented ‘the cloud’ way back then, as all our desktop PCs had no hard disk, all the application software and data was kept on secure central file-servers, that way we could manage version control and reliable back-up, with the added bonus that any user could use any PC in the whole estate and access all their personal applications and data.
Once we got to over 2,000 PCs on the network, I got bored and left – well if I’m honest, I wasn’t bored at all, I was just seduced adequately to move to another company to repeat the trick. Worked out well for me. Happy memories.