It’s Only When You Look Back

Discussion on lobste.rs Discussion on Slashdot I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen a similar step change. But just as my Poppa said “When it’s happening you don’t notice it. It’s only when you look back you see how much everything has changed.” Last month, this website passed a pretty big milestone: it’s been online for over 25 years (since Tuesday, May 29th 2001 - a few days after I finished my university finals exams), making it my online home now for my entire professional career. All along, I’ve been creating content and documenting my various projects and interests of the time, which has turned it into something of a personal time capsule. All of which makes this feel like the right moment to stop and look back at the archived history of this site, my online presence and tech trends that have come and gone. This is going to be a bit of a long (and sometimes embarrassing) one, but I think I’ve earned a little indulgence! Firstly: No, I’m not going to mention AI. That’s a topic for another day. Secondly: I have spent a lot of time putting this article together, digging out the old screenshots and trying to make sure my memories align with the correct events. But bear in mind this is a look back over many decades of personal, website and tech history - so it’s possible my recollections may be a bit off. Friendly corrections welcome! From Cassettes To The Cloud When I do stop and think about how much the world has changed, and what we now for take for granted, it really sinks in. I first started writing code about 40 years ago, with my first home computer - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I can remember exactly the first program I typed in, as I still have the manual.

To put things into perspective, here’s the juxtaposition of what my first lines of code would have looked like - typed carefully into a squishy rubber keyboard plugged into the family TV - alongside my current 2026 Ruby On Rails dev setup and my latest project: In my lifetime so far, I’ve gone from an 8-bit 3.5Mhz computer with 48KB memory, to my current laptop (Apple MacBook Pro) that has nearly 400 thousand times the memory and runs millions of times faster. And that’s just my laptop - Looking around my homelab, one of my refurbished systems (an old HP workstation) has 112 threads at 2Ghz and 1TB memory! I’ve gone from a 1,200 baud modem calling BBSes to gigabit fibre internet; from cassette tapes and floppy disks to NVMe drives for storage; and from being the only kid in my street with a computer to genuinely losing count of the number of devices I own that qualify for that term. Phones, personal and work laptops, tablets, old devices sitting in the back of a drawer, “smart” TVs, Raspberry Pis… Not to mention my old retro systems I still have. A Different Kind Of Soundtrack Because computers became such an important part of my life (and frankly, something of a refuge as I was growing up), I find that, much as certain songs pin me to a particular moment, a single piece of technology can catapult me instantly back in time. It’s like another kind of soundtrack to my life: I see an Acorn Archimedes RISC OS desktop, and suddenly I’m right back in the school “design & technology” labs - smelling of sawdust and glue guns - at lunchtime, because I understand computers more than I do people. I hear an old chip tune or see an Amiga cracktro, and I’m in the basement of my mum’s house, an awkward teenager staying up way beyond my bedtime writing letters and swapping floppy disks with contacts in the underground demo/cracking scene. I see a late ’90s pimped-out Linux desktop (Enlightenment Blue Steel, anyone?)

and I’m sat up in my student digs, trying to work out where I’m going in life, breaking my new Linux install for like the 20th time. As this site and it’s predecessor have been online since the late 90s, I’ve seen tech trends come and go and have worked on some really fun stuff. Thanks to archive.org and my own snapshots and backups, I’ve managed to go back through the years and build up a timeline of all the different technology eras. It’s kind of a “Website CV” and tour through the technolgies and cultures of the day, starting from my first dabblings in hand-crafted HTML to the modern cloud-native world. It’s brought back a lot of memories as well as some decidedly cringy photos and website design… But first… Pre-History My digital footprints extend even further back: As well as getting me started on my computing journey, my very first computer also established my first pre-internet on-line presence. Fuelled by endless re-watchings of War Games, I’d become aware of the then-burgeoning BBS scene and I eventually saved up and bought this bad boy: Connected to my 8-bit computer, I got to experience a connection speed of around 0.0012 Megabits/Second in today’s terms! In our modern always-on, always-connected world where we’re tethered to the Internet 24/7, it’s hard to put into words how different the home computing scene was back then. Each computer was it’s own little island, and data transfer was usually carried out by copying tapes (and later floppy disks) and swapping them in the school yard. With a modem, I got to explore the local BBS scene and was the first time I experienced that feeling of being connected to actual real-life people across the void, albeit with identities closely guarded behind cryptic handles. I’ve even found old archives of these BBS systems from back then and a few of my old logins still even work! My own TNFS Site is one of my recent projects that aims to re-create that magic I felt back then, and it’s been a real blast seeing users logging in and leaving messages on something akin to the BBS sites of old. I eventually upgraded to an Amiga system - the essential computing system for the discerning 90s teenage hacker.

Through the Amiga, I got more involved in the demo scene and made a lot of connections on BBS systems as well as through “mail trading”. Though much of my work from that time has been lost, there are still many archived disk images out there with my handywork, bearing my old scene handle and group affiliations. I’d started hanging out on bigger, more well-connected boards (many of which still exist today!) although my funds only initially stretched to a 9600-baud modem. I’d heard mention of this mysterious “Internet” thing, and some of the larger boards of the time offered a gateway to access services like FTP and Telnet. Magazines had just started mentioning the Internet and including enticing FTP URLs and some even had a “website” - whatever that was. Problem was, in addition to the phone bills and costs involved in signing up with one of the early ISPs, my Amiga would have had required upgrades beyond my budget and towards the end of the 90s I could see the writing on the wall for the platform. Although I even now still write and release software for my Amiga, I was heading to university, and had to begrudgingly jump ship to a more industry standard PC platform. I was moving into shared accommodation at the time, and had to leave my modem behind but that didn’t matter - the University had an incredible, proper connection to the Internet with speeds that were measured in (single-digit) actual Megabits/second. University At University, I got my first ever email address (which is still burned into my brain), and also got access to the computer labs full of Windows 3.1 machines replete with Trumpet Winsock and Internet Explorer 4.0. It was then I also got started on my Unix/Linux journey as there was a pool of Linux (Running RedHat 4.x and FVWM95) PCs and some Sun Ultra 5s running Solaris 7 that hardly anyone ever used. Much of my early memories of the Internet were therefore experienced through trusty old Netscape Navigator 4 and the CDE desktop.

It was a pretty pivotal moment for the Linux scene - the introduction of the 2.2-series of kernels and distros like RedHat 6.x meant that people were starting to take Linux seriously, although the die-hard Solaris snobs were still saying that “Linux couldn’t scale” and it was a mere toy operating system. I vividly remember during my work placement year sneaking in Linux “through the back door”, setting up Samba servers, Apache webservers with mod_perl, firewalls and other infrastructure running on discarded desktop PCs. Browser-wise, it was still mainly Netscape or Internet Explorer v4.x. The Mozilla project had started, but the early betas were more-or-less unusable so by the end of my course, I ended up mostly using Konqueror under KDE 2. There was also a big jump in desktop usability at the time, and we also got XFree86 4.x in this period which introduced anti-aliased font rendering and a whole host of other technologies we now take for granted. I remember things like hacking libfreetype with #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER to get proper (patent-infringing) hinting support, and it was just considered “business as usual”. Anyone complaining about Linux font rendering now should take a look at what we had to deal with back then: I wote a short guide to fixing things up which was archived in 2002, and from the timestamp in the clock, and the window decorations on my desktop I’d say this screenshot was probably a beta of Red Hat 8.0, or one of the later 7.x series before the Fedora project started. I see Konquerer again running in the background in file-browser mode there; Funnily enough, Konqueror ended up being the browser engine that “won” as it begat KHTML which in turn gave us WebKit / Blink. The Proto-Web To get around the early web, I’d use Yahoo! Index or AltaVista to find things, and signed up to a lot of mailing lists. Most of them have long-since disappeared from the Internet and I can’t find any usable archives but I remember frequenting “sunmanagers” and other lists where I learned early netiquette such as the cardinal sin of top-posting.