The scene: My attic computer room, circa 1996. I was thirteen at the time, and just been given reign of the attic floor, which my father had recently made into a livable space. One room was my bedroom, and the other I made into my “computer” room (though my parents insisted on referring to it as the “guest bedroom”, but that just didn’t sound as cool).

To connect to the internet, I would begin by flipping an old fashioned switch on the wall. See, our house had two phone lines; one was the main line, and the second was a business line for my mother’s photography business. Of course, it didn’t take very long for me to commandeer that second line as my modem line. Unfortunately, our house was very old, and the phone lines crossed in such a way that any calls to the main line would disconnect the second line. I started to despise anyone who called while I was on the internet. Remember, this was in a time when downloading a ten megabyte file could take hours (or at least what seemed like it).

Hence, the wall switch. This did some magical spell to the wires (I was never really good with hardware) that prevented me from being disconnected. Next, I would dial the local number for our internet service provider, IDT. I would log in with my password, a random sequence of letters and numbers that I still use today.

Finally, I would bring up the page for my web host: Tripod. Anyone remember Tripod? I believe they were even before Geocities, and gave a massive free five megabytes to anyone wanting to develop their own website. For me, this website was on a subject dear to my heart: Video games. Hence, “Video Game Haven” was born at the somewhat cryptic URL of http://www.tripod.com/members/M/MaDHaTtEr999/vgh.

Imagine my surprise when I did a quick search for that old nickname of mine and actually found that the website still exists – thirteen years later! I have to admit I’m extremely impressed that Tripod 1) is still around and 2) actually still has my account online and posted.

Here’s a few things I noticed when looking at the site:

• I was a member of the “Internet Link Exchange“, who I’m sure went out of business a long time ago and is now apparently owned by Microsoft. It was a banner exchange system where you put dynamic code on the top of your site that rotated in and out sites with a similar theme as yours. Why didn’t we just put in text links to our other favorite sites? I’m not sure. I think it was the mentality back then that banner ads were the pinnacle of advertising.
• I used an actual image map! I remember how complicated it was to set this up, and looking at it now I can’t help but wonder why I didn’t just use separate images.
• I had the classic 90′s counter and guestbook. The guest book is pretty entertaining. One post is from a “clan war” that got started when I named my Quake clan (which consisted of, well, just me) after the same name as another clan. The “war” consisted of them spamming my guestbook and contact form.
• I practiced some very bad HTML habits. For instance, if I wanted lots of spaces I would repeat the paragraph code a few dozen times. I linked to images on other sites instead of hosting them on my own. I don’t think I closed any tags besides centering and links.
• I have to admit, the HTML code I used to stylize the title of each page looked pretty darn cool.
• I made a lot of promises that the website would be updated soon, which were usually below another update saying even better updates were coming along.
• Apparently, my idol back then was Alicia Silverstone.