 20051220 AOLpress
I first started making webpages when I was 13 using a free WYSIWYG editor offered by AOL to its subscribers called AOLpress. My family was still paying for the Internet by the hour, so I would bike over to a library computer where I installed the program. I spent most of my time downloading copies of websites I liked just to open them with AOLpress to see how certain elements and effects were made, and then most likely I copied them onto my own pages (for my fictional newsletter, and design company). Eventually, I learned HTML, but I kept using AOLpress throughout high school until I could afford a copy of Dreamweaver.The point of this post is that after all this time, I found a copy of the AOLpress installation file. The 11-year-old software works on my XP machine and after playing with it for the past hour, I've concluded that it's still great! If my mom ever wanted to make a webpage, I would give this to her before any other program. It is simple, yet comprehensive -- just enough of everything for an absolute beginner to make a good page. I feel ridiculous for feeling so fond for a piece of software -- but sadly/luckily I spent a majority of my pubescent years obsessed with it. In hindsight, I remember how enabled I felt! I could publish anything!!! Then again, I also remember the countless skipped dinners when my mom, angry that I'd ignored her call to come to the table, would scream from the kitchen, "THAT COMPUTER IS NOT YOUR GIRLFRIEND!!" 7
Comments:
Melissa said... Haha, this sounds so much like you, as much as I can tell. I think it's a nice story about you. And look where your obsession has gotten you. 6:04 AM Jakob said... I used some web-based site editor through AOL, and then I switched to Windows Notepad, which I used until senior year of college. At that point I switched to Dreamweaver which I still use. 9:32 AM said... Yea.. definately been there! Always pretended not being able to hear moms calls - while using the old frontpage installation on my dads crappy notebook... Now I'm back to notepad - notepad2 to be exact... Used GoLive's WYSIWYG though during the days I messed around with all the table tags not knowing how awful the resulting code actually turned out... 10:37 AM Brian B. said... Sounds like my early internet days as well. On the graphics side, i started using Jasc Paint Shop Pro (now owned by Corel, btw) around version 3.x Oh the joy of my first transparent GIF!!! Oh - FWIW, my first time on the internet was through the ancient beast known as Prodigy. Anybody remember that? I remember having to put the handset of a classic phone on top of the modem (like the bottom phone pictured here) so it could receive/transmit. 12:14 PM mk said... my family signed up for prodigy back in 1990, and I don't think they had website software back then. I still only know how to use notepad to make sites...not that they're spellboundingly awesome or anything. great mom quote! 12:55 PM Jess said... Yeah I taught myself HTML and CSS when I was 10. Why? Because I was, and still am a computer nerd. Unfortunately I can't draw or do anything creative, so creating graphics for my site is pretty much out of the question. I have Dreamweaver, but I just don't like using it. I prefer to write the code from scratch. The only downside of that is that I don't remember ever single code off by heart and end up having to use code from other sites and editing it. Yeah that quote from your mum at the end was hilarious. 9:40 PM noahstone said... Man, what a difference 10 years makes. I spent my early pubescence on BBSs with my ATARI 800 and a 300 baud Hayes modem downloading ASCII porn. Did I just say that out loud? 3:09 AM Post a Comment |
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 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt   Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |
