Down, a website

Behold the first website I made, in 1995. Created to try and publicise my weird novel Down, this small collection of pages was hosted on Realnet, a tiny ISP ran out of a terrace house in Newtown, Sydney. They offered a package deal common at the time, including five hours of dialup time a week, access to email, newsgroups and other services, as well as the ability to host a small number of web pages. I remember taking the first version of this site to their terrace basement on a floppy disc, mainly because I didn't umderstand FTP then, not because it was SOP.

Sometime in early 1996 I archived the files in a Stuffit backup and they've been surviving in my backups until today. It turns out the unix utility "unar" can handle Stuffit compression, and now I return them to the web.

Not without a little editing though, it's remarkable how bad the code was and yet they rendered in their time, or at least I remember them working. Lots of white space between attributes and their values. This was very much the era when the primary way to learn HTML was inspecting the source of other pages and copying and stealing what you liked or could understand. I believe this predated background colours, so the pages would have been rendered with that weird gunmetal gray background which was maybe chosen to be kind on the eyes or something. Actually I remember it as the default colour of window frames and widgets in many operating systems of the time. Page background colour was a huge advance.

The "For Jenn" page is a mystery, I won't link it because it's obviously an experiment to try and use a creative font by spelling out a poem using gifs of each letter. This was the era when users had very little copntrol over such things. Anyway I don't have the letter gifs so it's pointless.

The Author page is a blast. I forget so much from that time. The Chooser window showing the many computers connected to our LAN is a precious artifact. At least two of the people represented there have died. Sam Shovel our landlord is still living in a warehouse in 2024! Thanks for the memories.