Twenty years of web design

I do not usually talk about my work but as the 6th of November 2015 marks my 20th anniversary of entering the world of work i shall make an exception and maybe drone on with a few war stories.

Having graduated in the Summer of 1995 with a degree in Software Engineering i naturally was aiming for a career in computing though i had little idea doing what. I was successful in my second interview after graduation and started work at a company called Third Wave. My new boss had recently been to the US and seen the demos of Netscape 2.0 which, it was hoped, would bring the new (and hardly used compared to today) world wide web to the masses. He also heard about the promising new technologies like SSH which would enable secure commerce over the internet, e-commerce in other words. I was hired to produce websites for a new off-shoot company called Tw2, specifically websites that could sell stuff...

Now this was all new to me to be honest, i hadn't even seen a graphic web page at that point. I had been using the internet since 1991 at uni but this was with telnet, ftp and the likes. I had "surfed" in text-mode using lynx and had done some basic html but not actually seen a proper webpage. Still that didn't matter i've never been one to worry about that kind of thing! On my first day in my new job i went online (dial-up natch) and had a look around. These were the early days of the web still, especially in terms of e-commerce. Amazon's website had only started up a few months before. An internet search (what search engine i used i cannot remember, this was years before Google) indicated that i needed to do some CGI programming and Perl. I hadn't heard of either before.

I also needed a web server, though we did not have any web space at the time. I ran OS/2 Warp on my PC at home and knew that could run a web server so i installed OS/2 on my work PC, downloaded a Perl implementation and started work. I was to create an e-commerce website for a large retailer called Software Warehouse. We were aiming to go live in early 1996 but first of all we had to prove the concept to the heads of the major software houses and suppliers at a presentation in a London hotel in December. Yes next month!

I was given a data dump of the stock database, a huge mass of text (text dump from SQL Server i believe) and my first job was to develop a CGI search for that data. This was not a simple process especially as i was having to learn Perl at the same time though luckily as i found out Perl is excellent for handling text files. With few resources online (and limited dial-up access anyway - i had to dual boot the PC into Windows to go online to look for stuff then reboot into OS/2 to implement what i had found!) i once had to resort to going to Waterstones one lunchtime and looking up how to do something in a book on Perl!

However progress was steady and as December approached the website was taking shape (albeit all running on my PC). My boss Ross was a great designer, and a rabid Steve Jobs and Apple fan (the man had a working Lisa in my office - i'm sure my later conversion to Mac-dom is largely thanks to him). His design for the Software Warehouse website was based on NeXT's site though went further. Our site was not just a digital brochure, visitors could search a database, could add things to a basket and then go and purchase them. This seems so common place now but in late 1995 it was genuinely cutting edge.

It was now time for the demonstration, where Ross would demonstrate my website (running on my PC still) to some of the heads of the British computing industry (heads of Adobe UK, Corel et cetera). I was there just in case anything went wrong... but no it all went smoothly and everyone seemed suitably impressed (or at least not too appalled). Now all that was left to do was actually implement the site on a proper server, installing the horror that was Netscape Commerce Server to handle the secure connections, and building a back-end for order management. But that was for 1996. This blog post is about my first few months at work as a web developer.

These days i am an e-learning developer, creating online courses for a distance learning college. I haven't really touched e-commerce (apart from as a user) since my Tw2 days (which lasted until the company went bust in 2001) but that's fine. I was there at the start, the Software Warehouse e-commerce site was one of the first in the UK, and i'm proud to have had to build everything from scratch. But life moves on and the stuff i do these days, especially involving responsive design for mobile learning, makes me proud too.

Chromebook

For the last few years the pattern has been for me to do all of my serious stuff like Photoshop on my Macbook and use an iPad as a truly personal computer for surfing and the like. However as my iPad has aged i have found fewer and fewer of the websites i use regularly such as the Guardian worked satisfactorily on it. I was also finding an onscreen keyboard a bit of a pain to use for major text entry. So i switched instead to using my older Macbook, however this was only a temporary solution.

Ever since my Mum book a Chromebook i have thought about getting one for myself and i have finally made the plunge. Because i wanted something that would be relevant for a few years at least i plumped for the high end Pixel from Google, which in some ways has a superior spec to my main Macbook...

And very nice Katie the Chromebook is too. I am still getting used to the different way in working but i think it will be a pleasing adventure.

Return of the TwiggyMac

The Twiggy Mac is the stuff of myth surely? Macintosh prototypes up until a fairly late stage in the project to produce the Apple Macintosh in 1984 were going to use the same 5 1/4 inch "Twiggy" disk drive as used in the Apple Lisa. Unfortunately the Twiggy drive was rubbish and often failed. Luckily Sony had just bought out their new 3.5 inch floppy drive format and the rest was history...

But it was assumed that none of the Twiggy drive equipped Macintosh prototypes had survived as Apple had them all recalled and destroyed in 1983. However one was found and later on another one turned up too! After some restoration work the Twiggy Macs now work again and could boot from the original Twiggy system disks which included a beta version of Mac OS from August 1983. This version of the eventual first release of Mac OS included some intriguing differences from the final version including "Steve sez" in dialogue boxes. The whole story is recounted in the highly enjoyable Twiggy Mac website.

I don't have any original Macs but i do have the second version, a 512K, and here it proudly is (serves as a clock stand these days to be honest)...

The code for MS-DOS at last!

Microsoft have donated the source code for MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum. The source code can be downloaded and read. Its fairly interesting but only for historical reasons.

I had a brief look through the source code for COMMAND.COM, my 8086 assembler is a bit rusty (and was never that good to be honest) but it seemed fairly straightforward. Of course these early versions of MS-DOS were far more basic and limited than modern operating systems like Mac OSX but then again the file sizes were somewhat smaller...

I still remember buying MS-DOS 4.01 on diskette to upgrade the Amstrad PC we had at the time, which came with version 3.2. I used to be quite nifty at writing batch files though can barely remember any of the language nowadays! @echo off or something...

The strange beauty of historic computers

Wired have a great article on the sights and smells of historic computing, the strange beauty indeed of the "olden days" of computing : mainframes, minicomputers, line printers and other historic computing artifacts. Many of the computers and peripherals at places like the Computer History Museum in California (somewhere i must visit one day!) still work after being restored adding an extra dimension to the experience. The sound and heat of a punched card reader...

It is a very different tech world to now, a bigger world too. Computers filled huge rooms with printers being the size of small cars, plus tape units the size of wardrobes. That is part of the fascination i feel, its just so different to the computing we use now.

Unfortunately by the time i entered work we were past the age of old iron, though i did use a Prime minicomputer at university which was great fun. The biggest computer i've ever had physical access to is a HP PC server which was the size of a small fridge. Just not the same as a room full of IBM 360. One place i must try and get to this year is the UK National Museum of Computing which includes a fair amount of old iron in it's collection.

Photo from Flickr Commons

Camera C64

Instagram is one of my favourite apps with its ability to add a layer of faux retro-ness to your photos. Camera C64 takes it to the next level. The iPhone app modifies your photos to the resolution and colour depth of graphics on the Commodore C64 with its VIC-II video chip! The app is free though there is an optional (and very cheap) in-app purchase for extra colour filters for green, amber and B&W monitors. They were easily worth 69p to be honest! An example photo is below. Interestingly since i installed this app i have found there is another similar app too.

All very nice, though i never had a C64, i did have a VIC-20 though and still have a C16 somewhere... Here is a photo i took yesterday (of the canal natch).

How do you name your computers?

Its a standard geeky question, what convention do you use to name your computers? Some use the names of planets, gods from Greek mythology, comic characters. I used to use the names of Indonesian towns and cities (don't ask).

Of course this is more important and relevant if you are a business with large numbers of computers and there are a number of websites with advice on suitable and scalable conventions. Much of the advice suggests sensible and geographical/functional names which is fine for big organisations but otherwise i think we should use a bit of whimsy.

Recently i decided to start a new convention and re-name my kit, i decided on female names so my computer is Miriam (my old one has retrospectively become Suzy) and my new iPad is Mary-Ann. So it didn't feel left out i decided to name my typewriter too, that is now Dorothy (did try Deborah but she didn't like it).

The rise of the microcomputer

An interesting video from the Open University discussing the rise of the microcomputer in the 1980s and the great variety of machines as computers became democratised and were within the aim of normal people and not just corporations. Some lovely nostalgia as well here, i remember my ZX-80, VIC-20 and BBC Micro well...

Building my first iPhone app

On a rainy Sunday afternoon i finally got around to installing Apple's Xcode development suite on my Mac. My first degree was software engineering and i have done quite a bit of programming in the past (going back to my days on the Sinclair ZX-80!) though i haven't done a great deal in my job in recent years. Nearly all the programming i do these days is Perl CGI for myself, i have an on-line database of my book collection for example.

However i have felt like trying a bit of iOS development, i have vague ideas of an app to help people navigate the canals in the Midlands (canals being another interest of mine). So i installed Xcode then went through a "Hello World" exercise, the result you can see below running on an iPhone simulator. The app is very simple though is quite involved, its a bit more complicated than writing

10 PRINT "I AM THE BEST"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

on a microcomputer in Dixons and then running away...

When i have time i will get around to planning a canal navigation app. Time is the key constraint there.

Early microcomputer nostalgia

The appearance of some of the earliest (if not earliest) known Apple computer photographs on-line has sparked some early microcomputer nostalgia for me. If you haven't seen this article about the Apple I then its well worth a read, especially some of the comments below the article.

I'd love to have an Apple I though i am content to own a pair of Apple ][s! The mid-70s were the true genesis of the personal computer revolution though my own story started in the early 80s when my Dad bought a Sinclair ZX-80 and i started to program.

The original Apple I was a kit as were many microcomputers in the mid-70s, in fact the ZX-80 also came in kit form. My Uncle bought and built the kit, i don't know whatever happened to his one though.

Chromebook

This house is an Apple shop, indeed at times it can look like an Apple Store that has been left forgotten in a decaying mall. Thats before we get to the Apple Museum currently housed in my loft. However i have an interest in technology in general and when my Mum chose a Chromebook* as her laptop ahead of a tablet or other device i was secretly delighted as i was interested in what the Google powered laptop would be like...

The Chromebook (an Acer one) replaces a Dell desktop monster that has Vista on it, it takes so long to boot up ice ages come and go before you can get anywhere. Thankfully the Chromebook is very fast to boot up. Indeed if you wanted to check something online you could boot up, check it out, read a few other things and then shutdown before the Dell monster had even got to the desktop stage.

The Chromebook is basically a stripped down subnotebook that uses a restricted version of Linux and the Chrome web browser as its interface. It works really well too. The trackpad is maybe a bit annoying but i am comparing that against my new Macbook Pro (which costs a lot more, indeed you could buy 5 Chromebooks for the price of my Macbook!) The screen is also no more than adequate compared to retina displays and the like but the speed and functionality is fine. I set up a few sites for my Mum including BBC iPlayer and full-screen video playback was fine. It may struggle to do much more than web surfing and email but if thats all you do on a computer then the Chromebook will be fine for your needs. I like the Chromebook a lot, do i prefer it to my (first generation) iPad? I think they are on a par though newer iPads would leave the Chromebook behind a bit (but cost a lot more). Of course you get a proper keyboard with the Chromebook... though its not the best i've ever used on a notebook, but still better than virtual keyboards which i've never got the hang of.

It all depends on what you need out of a computer of course but its hard not to recommend the Chromebook.

* She chose it without any prompting by me, she went purely on price.

Here she is

As  i said in an earlier blog post i thought it was time i bought a new computer and yesterday i did just that when my shiny new Macbook Pro arrived! My old Macbook has served me well but after 3 and a half years is starting to slow a bit especially on the likes of Photoshop, software bloat drives forward computer sales like nothing else after all...

It took me a few hours to get everything transferred across and the applications i needed installed but everything seems up and fine now. Hopefully in another three and a bit years we'll be doing the same dance (i buy these computers in installments over 36 months hence the 3 year and a bit upgrade cycle) again. I suspect the next one won't have an optical drive (few computers in the Apple line-up do these days though my new one does) which is a shame as i found burning a DVD on the old one the best way to transfer files as the over-the-internet migration tool didn't work... oh well they have 3 years to get it right!

iPhone o'clock

Finally my exhausted c510 mobile phone has been retired (or put into reserve anyway) and i have got a new phone, an iPhone 4S no less. I love it of course, the only question being why did i wait so long to get one. Well of course the answer to that is i didn't actually buy it myself but it was bought for me by my wife. I did buy a rather nice and funky case for it though.

It is of course a big step up from my old phone which was barely a smart phone (though was OK for its time) but the novelty of nonsense like FourSquare hasn't yet faded away. I'm the mayor of the patch of canal i walk most lunchtimes of course.

Making Lion look like... well System 7.5-ish

Great as Mac OSX is i do miss the old Finder and UI from pre-OSX Mac days. Of course it crashed a lot, didn't have very good multitasking and less toys than OSX but some charm and fun was lost when Apple transitioned. I miss the days of trying a funky extension (remember the one that rendered your desktop in ASCII characters?) and Resedit to do weird (and dangerous things) to your Mac.

Well we can't go back to those days on a modern Mac (though maybe i'll boot up one of my relics one of these days) but we can do a few things to make our uber-modern Macs more classic, more retro, only without da bomb. One thing i have done is use the excellent Displaperture.app to give my desktop rounded edges, as Steve insisted rounded rectangles are everywhere ok?

Another thing is to use a retro wallpaper. I used to like the green tartan wallpaper, luckily some other people had a yearning for the old wallpapers too and they are available to download. Now all i need is Chooser and i will be in retro-Mac hog heaven.

Firefox woes and redemption

Firefox is my favourite web browser and seems to work best with how i surf the web, so when Firefox started to develop terminal crash-itus on my work PC i was most annoyed. It remained rock solid at home on my Mac but quickly became unusable at work, crashing after 1 page load. I tried the latest version and even downgraded to version 3 after trying my best to scrub away the previous version from the hard drive but no joy, at most i gained a few hours respite.

I began to use Chrome as my main work browser which is fine though i don't really like how it works (and also does not work perfectly with the university's content management system). Then the IT department came and fixed my Firefox for me while i was away on holiday. It fixed things... well for a few days until the crashes returned. Then i disabled Flash...

Since then Firefox has worked for me nearly perfectly! I did have a couple of crashes this morning but these were the first since Monday. So it seems like it may have been the Flash plugin all along, now surfing sans Flash is a slight inconvenience (and ironic because i completed FLI Flash Introduction in the Spring!) but to be honest it is not a total loss and Chrome is always available for Flash enabled pages. HTML5 works fine of course and that is where we are going as a university in any case (and at home too, thanks to the wonderful Hype program).

Getting down with the iCloud

Over the last few days, and after the downloading of many megabytes of operating system updates for my Macbook and iPad, i have started exploring Apple's new cloud based service, iCloud, which is intended to supplement your assorted Apple devices, the cloud becoming a kind of glue?

So the basic premise is this, your "stuff" is available on whatever you use, you don't have to worry about your files being on device A when you want to use device B and if you make changes on device B you can later view and edit them on device A, the cloud makes it all work without you noticing. Well that is the theory anyway, does it actually work?

So far i am pretty impressed, my bookmarks have been seamlessly synchronised between the Safari instances running on both devices, as is my iCal calendar, which i can also view online and edit the calendar there if need be. I installed Pages, Apple's word processor, on both devices though found that only the iPad version can save to the cloud. Yet anyway.

There is still work to be done, especially programs getting iCloud support, but hopefully this will happen over the next few months. The Mac version of Pages able to write to the cloud would be good, especially when i start writing essays again later in the year.

When social networks attack

The big news social media wise this week are the changes to Facebook and the forthcoming even bigger changes. Taking the changes to the news feed first i can't say i'm that big a fan. I don't like Facebook deciding for me which of the personal news items in my feed is the "top story", surely that is for me to decide not a faceless multi-billion dollar corporation. Facebook's UI has also got rather clunky over time and the latest changes make this worse.

But Facebook hasn't cost me anything so why am i complaining? Thats an argument some people have presented, free service changes things so why moan? Well Facebook may be free in monetary terms but its not free in other areas of value : personal time, information, content. As a social network Facebook is very little without user generated content, generated by us of course. We've all spent a lot of time and effort in generating this content which attracts users to Facebook and hence eyeballs to adverts. Therefore i think its perfectly reasonable for us to complain when they change it!

As for the longer term changes, Facebook looks to be trying to become an entertainment hub. I can't say that interests me that much personally but it might work, it does sound rather Myspace-esque (and that worked well right?)

Micro Life (9) : Apple iMac

Working at a web design agency exposed me, for the first time, to Macintoshes. At first i thought they were rather aloof and strange with their big monitors and tendency to crash all the time but then i started to get used to the Apple way and found it was good. A friend showed me, on his 7200, how to stop thinking the Windows way and to think the Mac way with drag and drop and other amazing GUI thrills. I was hooked and it was time to buy my own Mac.

I did already have an old SE by then but i couldn't do much with that. The thing about Macs of course is that they are a bit more expensive than PCs and as i was probably only on about 14K at the time buying a new Mac, new monitor and all the other paraphernalia was a bit daunting. But then Apple introduced the iMac which was an all-in-one computer with monitor and networking already built in. So i bought one.

This was the original iMac of course, PowerPC equipped and running at a speedy 233Mhz. I think it ran Mac OS 8.1 out of the box though 8.5 came fairly quickly afterwards. For the next few years it gave me trouble free  computing, though was short of grunt for the move to OSX (i did experiment with OpenBSD at one stage) though did serve OK as a web server even if it took about an ice age to boot up.

I upgraded to a faster iMac in the early 2000s though i have kept this original iMac to the current day. It hasn't been turned on for a while though and is kept under my desk, so i end up accidentally kicking it several times a day.

The Micro-Life series will end at this point but to conclude this iMac was superseded by a 350Mhz dark blue iMac (which my ex-wife made off with), then i returned to the dark side for some reason and bought a Dell PC (which i still have) and finally a couple of years ago returned to the fold and bought my current Macbook. Over the last decade i have also bought or been given dozens of old Macs and other old computers, many i still have and you can see them here.

My current Macbook has a Dual Core processor running at 2.1GHz and 2GB of RAM, my first computer the ZX-80 has a Z80 processor running at 3.5MHz and 1KB of RAM. So there has been a bit of progress over the last 30 years.

Micro Life (8) : Tulip 486DX-100

Now we are in the PC age in my weekly recounting of my past computers there might be a sense this Micro Life series is getting a bit boring now? But stay with me as there is a twist soon. Last time i wrote about my lovely Unisys 386 that introduced me to the world of GUIs, 32 bit computing and even CD-ROMs! However by the time i had graduated i needed a more powerful computer and finally had a salary so could buy one. So i went down to Morgan Computers again.

I ended up with a 486 by Tulip Computers. Another nice solid box, though not my first choice actually. I first took home a no-brand PC box which had a faster specification however this lasted precisely 22 minutes before it conked out. I was offered another one but didn't like the rather flimsy system to be honest so got the Tulip instead. This had a 100MHz 486DX processor, i think the hard drive was 500MB and 8MB of RAM.

For the next couple of years it gave me trouble free computing. The monitor did blow up at one stage though so i bought a hernia-inducing 17" monitor instead. It was fine... but i was now working at a web design agency full of funky Mac boys. It was time to switch...

Micro Life (8b) : Macintosh SE

To be honest the story does get a bit complicated now, as i had money at last i was able to have more than one computer at a time. I'll just stick to my main computer in this series but i think the first "incidental" computer is worth a mention. I bought a Mac SE from Cash Converters for 50 quid, as you do! There wasn't a great deal i could do with this ancient Mac especially when i discovered there was a flaw with the floppy drive which meant, while it could read floppies it formatted itself, these floppies were unreadable in any other Mac. So my first Mac was an island... well until i got my hands on some more old Macs later on and installed a Localtalk bridge on a Mac IIci so i could access floppies on the SE over the network.

Micro Life (7) : Unisys 386SX-33

After a couple of laptops (or 1 laptop and 1 beast in the PPC) i decided to forget portability and get a "proper" PC so i could do some programming and the like on it. Morgan Computers was my destination again (my first 4 computers came from there) and i bought a nice little Unisys PC. It was a small compact little box which had solidity to it (which makes me think it was surplus stock from a government order). Inside was a 386SX-33 microprocessor (yes we were going 32 bit!) and 4MB of RAM. It was also my first computer with a built in hard drive, a massive 80MB! It came with an Apple RGB monitor (Morgan tended to mix and match what was available).

This was however my second choice, i had intended to go to Morgan to get an IBM PS/1 but they had sold out of that, this Unisys system had a better specification though so its an ill-wind.

For the next few years this little workhorse served me well and i upgraded the hardware a few times. The RAM was doubled to 8MB and i got an external CD-ROM drive. This enabled me to install OS/2 Warp. It didn't exactly run fast but it did run OK and was interesting to play with. I also bought my first modem (2400 baud natch) for some telnet and ftp fun (this was pre-public web of course).

The computer served me until i graduated from university but then i needed something more powerful and by then had a job so i could actually pay for something, but that is a story for next time.