Chapter 1. You Must Have Fun
Do you remember your very first web page? The first one you ever saw? I remember the first time I saw a web page. I'm not sure if such a memory is unusual, or if many people remember their first glance at what was to become ubiquitous in a very short time.
The time was late 1993 or early 1994. I was working at Intel as a contract software developer when one of the other developers asked me if I'd seen this application called Mosaic. I wasn't among the first to see this new type of application, but at that time the Web was still in its most primitive form. The first web page I saw had a white background, a larger, bolder header, and text formatted into several paragraphs. It wasn't anything special, and nothing to excite interest. However, in the page was a thing called a hypertext link, an underlined piece of text that, when clicked, opened another page—one on a completely different computer, connected to the first only by a domain-driven location.
The second site, like the first, was also incredibly simple. It featured the same black text on a white page, and the only typographical variation was the larger font for the titles. It was completely empty of any graphics. No CSS; no images or Flash; not even a FONT or BLINK. However, the two pages did demonstrate all that was critical about the Web: both pages were available to anyone with an Internet connection, each was at a specific location that could be called up again, and the pages were served through ...