The original site
The version of my website you’re looking at now runs on a sophisticated content management system (WordPress with 24 active plugins) and contains writing from around 2010 onwards. But the site actually dates from March 2001 — with development beginning in late 2000 — in the very early days of the World Wide Web. That version is still intact, and you can navigate around it via this link.
To understand what the internet was like in 2000, it helps to remember how young all of this was. Tim Berners-Lee published the first website on 6 August 1991 — a text-only page at CERN in Geneva, describing what the World Wide Web was and how it worked. It was addressed to scientists. The first browser that ordinary people could actually use — Mosaic, developed at the University of Illinois — didn’t appear until 1993. Yahoo launched in 1994. Amazon in 1995. Google opened its first office in 1998. None of what we now think of as the internet existed: LinkedIn launched in 2003, WordPress in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram not until 2010. This website went live just ten years after the first web page existed, and only eight years after anyone outside a research institution had a browser capable of viewing one.
The tools available to someone who wanted to build a personal website in 2001 were limited in ways that are difficult to convey now. The sophisticated styling and scripting tools that modern websites depend on either didn’t exist yet or were so poorly supported by browsers that most people ignored them. There were no content management systems, no blogging platforms worth speaking of, no drag-and-drop site builders. If you wanted to put something on the web, you either learned HTML or you found a tool that would write it for you. There were not many around, but the one I used was FrontPage by Microsoft. It looked, by current standards, extremely plain — but so did everything else. Photographs were small because dial-up connections made large ones impractical. Pages loaded line by line. There were no animations or elaborate page structures. It served pretty well for ten years despite that.
The original version of this site was written as a reference for me, that I could easily access wherever I was. The content was mainly travel and restaurant guides for the cities I visited as part of my work for IBM — practical information about places, things worth seeing, places worth eating. London featured heavily, and a surprising amount of that content remains reasonably accurate.
It is, inevitably, also a document of its era. The external links from 2001 have largely vanished — the internet of twenty-five years ago does not map onto the internet of today — and they have been disabled rather than left to send you somewhere baffling or non-existent. But the written content survives intact. The fact that it is still readable and navigable at all is mildly remarkable, and a testament to the durability of straightforward HTML.