Microsoft.com celebrates 20th anniversary
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Microsoft home page, the company has recreated that old page here. More here, including screenshots of subsequent designs.
In terms of “Web design,” the notion, much less the phrase, didn’t really exist.
“There wasn’t much for authoring tools,” Ingalls says. “There was this thing called HTML that almost nobody knew.” Information that was submitted for the new Microsoft.com website often came to Ingalls via 3-1/2-inch floppy disks.
“Steve Heaney and I put together PERL scripts that handled a lot of these daily publishing duties for us,” he says. “For a while, we ran the site like a newspaper, where we published content twice a day. And if you missed the cutoff for the publishing deadline, you didn’t get it published until the next running of the presses, or however you want to term it.”
Interestingly, Microsoft doesn’t seem to know exactly when the page first went live:
Based on the findings, it appears the website was launched during the time between HTML/1.0 (June 1993) and HTML/2.0 (Dec 1994).
I made a brief search of the NCSA What’s New Archive, where a web site for Microsoft should have been noted, and found nothing between June 1993 and September 1994. This piece written in 1999 about the beginnings of Microsoft’s site says the page launched in April 1994. I searched some early Usenet groups to no avail. Anyone have a more accurate date? (via waxy)
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