The things you find when you move...
05.30.07 / 09:25PM / Joe / comments: 2
 Remember when I was wondering what happened to my pre-Movable Type website? Well, I found it, and the location should have been obvious... what was the removable storage media of choice circa 1998?
ZIP DISKS
In my search for the missing website, the proto-fourhman.com, I had been through two old computers and hundreds of floppies (most of which I threw away... the floppies, not the computers.) But as I started pre-packing for the Big Move, I found a box stuffed with old CDs, even more fucking floppies, and a small pile of zip disks. I even found a SyQuest drive, and if you remember what those were, you're older than dirt.
So I hooked up one of my old zip drives ("one", 'cause I have more than one for some reason) to the 7600 that I never put away from the Night of a Thousand Floppies and started going through my zips. Didn't take long to find it, the version 4.X edition of fourhman.com, back from before it was even called fourhman.com. So I set to work pulling out the crap that wasn't too embarrassing and backdating it into Movable Type. You'll note that my monthly archive column formerly had a glass floor of February 2002... and I smashed straight through that bitch into February of 1998. Did we even have Teh Internet back then?
Now, it's nothing to get too excited about, because I didn't write a whole helluva lotta stuff back then. But I did manage to find some mega-old writings to properly intersperse with the video game reviews from that time period. Although anything before 2002 is more than likely a game review. Truth be told, there's a few others I have yet to release, because they are **so bad.**
Perhaps more exciting is that I found what I believe to be fourhman.com version 1.5 or 2.0, I forget which. v1.0 was the website I had to make for my "World Wide Web" class in college, and this version was the one that I slightly altered and posted to AOL. So this is about as early a fourhman.com as anybody is ever likely to see, and I have resurrected the front page for posterity. I have all the interior stuff too, but I'm not sure it's worth pushing live. That is what the web looked like ten years ago. And it's what MySpace pretty much looks like today, burn.
The best part of fourhman.com original recipe is that you can see the background pattern that I used on all of my Macs (home and office) for a period of about six years, starting in 1993. Although I haven't used it since 1999, I'll still always remember it as Joe's All Time Desktop.
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