Back in the early 90's, I bought my first IBM compatible PC. That's what we called those kinds of personal computers back then. I believe people just call them PCs or x86 compatible PCs. It doesn't matter, we know what we mean. It's not a Mac and it's not one of the other platforms that existed in the 80's but are no longer manufactured.

The PC cost me $2,400 and it was, quite literally, a piece of junk compared to today's PCs. That's not the topic at hand today. Today, I want to reminisce about how ugly the world wide web was back then.

I signed up with the only ISP that I could find in the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix, AZ, USA. It was dial-up at a speed of what I seem to remember as 19200 BAUD (yes, they used that word back then). I think it was equivalent to 1.92 kBPS. Incredibly slow by today's standards, but it was the best we could get back then. It didn't really matter — Web surfing hadn't caught on yet and the Internet was used primarily for electronic mail. My PC had "Windows for Workgroups (version 3.11)" on it and a third-party application had to be used to connect to the Internet — I believe it was called "Trumpet Winsock".

There were only a couple of web browsers in existence, and Internet Explorer hadn't been created yet. I believe one was called Mosaic while the other was called Netscape Navigator. Websites rendered horribly in both. I remember the incredibly awful blinking tags — thank the stars I haven't seen pages like those in a few years. There weren't many websites to go to and if Yahoo hadn't created a link directory later on, I wouldn't have been able to find anything.

There are still some ugly web pages out there. I've been to some today. I plan to visit more tomorrow.

I thank web designers everywhere for the advent of the content management systems, the weblogs (blogs), and everything else that has made viewing web pages easier on the eyes and easier to navigate.