This historic milestone has caused much nostalgic conversation at Infinity today, remembering our first interactions with WWW, the internet and email, and then the development of web analytics and of course call tracking. It is even making some of us feel a little old hearing that some of the younger Infinity team don't remember a life without the World Wide Web!
Chatting to our Dev Team, it was interesting to hear some of their memories of the early days.
Thomas Parrott, Technical Director
"I was at Goonhilly Earth station in Cornwall around 1996 on a family holiday (I'm pretty sure it's normal to go to a telecommunications satellite dish base station on family holidays right?) They had a visitors area and in it they had a small computer section that was connected to this new thing called Internet. I remember the home page was Yahoo.
I searched around a bit, but didn't really get it. A few years later in 1998, I first got the Internet at home almost immediately I started setting about trying to figure out how to create my own web page. I created my first website using Microsoft Publisher 97 but a year later in Oct 1999 a company called FreeNetName came on the scene, with the option of a free 'proper' domain name, that you could keep as long as you used their dial up service. So that was when www.tomp.co.uk was born, and I've had it ever since."
Chris Sedlmayr, Lead Software Engineer
"My early experiences consisted of; dial-up modem noises, 56k gaming (CS), and shares in freeserve!"
Patrick Polloni, Software Engineer
"I remember one day a friend showing me all the new gear he had just bought to connect to the Internet. He established a connection with a lot of noises coming from the phone and the modem, and once up he showed me a page. It was a page representing a wall where everybody could leave a message through a form. It seemed so cool, but not very useful. It took me some time, well years to understand the true importance of what I saw that day!"
George Arscott, Software Engineer
"My first memories of the World Wide Web were at school. I remember making my first webpage in an I.T lesson by copying some HTML our teacher made into a notepad file, and then figuring out how to change the background colour by typing random characters into the colour hex string."
