Over the weekend I heard from a dear old friend, Robin, whom I had lost touch with over the last few years. Robin and I met through my brother David. She had been on tour with David in “A Chorus Line” in the late80s . Robin and her longtime friend Stephen, another Chorus Line alum, lived in Seattle. When David would come to visit me he would always look them up. On one trip he took me over to their place, we had a riot, it was nonstop laughter… we became fast friends. Stephen has since passed away from cancer… that’s a story in itself!

In 1995 Robin, Stephen and I decided to collaborate on an idea I had to create a story to be written entirely online, we called it “WebTales An Evolving Tale of Cyberspace”.  Nowadays, there are probably hundreds of such things online but at the time it was a new concept. To give you an idea of how long ago this was in terms of the web, Internet Explorer 1 had just been released with the new OS Win 95! Netscape 1.1 was the most advanced browser with over 90% share of the market.

Hearing from Robin made me think about WebTales so I decided to look for my old files to see if I still had everything. Fortunately I found a floppy with just about everything still intact. I built the site on a 486 x66PC with 16 megs of ram on a 14.4 modem.  One of the only available web graphics editors at the time was a program called Lview (still available), very primitive by today’s standards. The graphic above was made with it. Style sheets didn’t exist, the use of tables to control layout was relatively new. The design is very simplistic and looking at it now not very appealing. The technologies that support this site,php and mysql didn’t yet exist. 

We didn’t keep the site up very long. We had some interest but in hindsight we were a bit too early. A year or so later the web really took off. It was similar to what I had experienced trying to sell businesses on the idea of a website, “what’s the WWW and why would I want a website?” was the common response. Well, we all know what has happened since then.

See the WebTales site

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