28
Dec
Things that live on forever….
There have been quite a few memes in the past decade about the stupid things you do online living forever. Well, it’s not just the stupid things, you see. Just for kicks, I went back and looked at the website of the very first organization I built a complete, commercial web-presence for, back in 1995.
The organization in question was the US Travel and Tourism Administration (USTTA), a division of the US Dept. of Commerce that keeps track of statistics about tourism and generally tries to support the industry (which, BTW is either the first or second largest US export, depending on how it’s counted). I was working for a government contractor, Ellsworth Associates (which has since been sold several times over) and was the head webmaster, a huge deal in 1995.
My very first job was to build a web presence for USTTA, which we would up calling TInet (in the fashion of the day…). So I set about designing a look and feel that would work well.
Fast forward to 2010, almost 15 years, and, guess what, TInet looks almost exactly the same…. Check it out: http://tinet.ita.doc.gov/research/index.html
Fantastic, how retro. I guess my 15 year old design was hugely advanced for it’s time. Wonder if they are still using the e-commerce (shopping cart back then) code I wrote in Perl all those years ago….. Hopefully it still runs on Linux.
P.S. Apparently there is no more shopping cart and it’s now running on IIS. So much for progress.