Dialogues

Geoff + Jay
This isn’t a website. Or even a blog. It’s a dialogue.

What was the moment the web clicked for you?

Answered By:

Geoff

•

I've researched enough people's experience with the web to know that most people who care deeply about it had a single moment that really defined when the web felt magical to them, and they decided to commit their lives to it. What was yours?

I had to think about this a bit because the web is so pervasive in my life — and has been for so long — that singling out the exact moment I decided to adopt it is buried under many other moments not totally unlike walking the halls of Long Term Memory in the movie Inside Out.

Still from the movie Inside Out showing Joy dragging Sorrow through aisles of brightly-lit glass orbs representing memories.
Source: Inside Out Wiki

And the more I think of it, deciding to adopt the web probably came down to many little moments that accumulated over time. For example, I was really into paint applications as a kid which is fairly common for anyone who came of age in the 90s. I loved that I could transform the computer’s cursor from a pointer to a paintbrush I could use to slap all kinds of colors (well, gray shades) and shapes on the screen.

Source: Uncredited, retrieved from DuckDuckGo

Mac Paint is not the web, of course. The magic was that I could manipulate the window in front of me. The web’s magic came to me when I found myself moving from one virtual place to another virtual place in the same window. I wasn’t drawing the canvas, but the canvas was drawn and then redrawn each time I navigated to another “page” vastly different from the previous one.

I guess you can say the web “clicked” for me when I started clicking.

The magic was the click, but the mystery of what comes after the click is the hook. Surfing from one page to another was strangely familiar because it felt like wandering through a really big and old mansion for the first time. I wonder where this door leads…

I’ve had countless “a-ha!” moments with the web since my first hike through it, most related directly to the web itself and how it works. That’s probably why I’m a web designer today. Learning to add style to webpages by writing CSS is my ultimate web “a-ha!” moment and the interest it sparked has lasted more than 20 years and continues to burn.

That’s just me. One of the many interesting things about the web is that it’s truly a one-size-fits-all cloth that makes it relevant, applicable, and useful for practically anyone and everyone. What’s magic to me may pale in comparison to what you first found magical about it. Which begs the question…

Next Question:

What, then, was the moment the web clicked for you?

In

One of us asks a question. The other answers it, and flips the conversation around with a follow up. No script or agenda or schedule. Just an ongoing dialogue between Geoff Graham and Jay Hoffmann waxing nostalgic about the web’s past and pondering it’s promise for the future.

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2 responses

  1. Patrick Grey Avatar
    Patrick Grey

    Hello Geoff and Jay,
    Lovely format. It got me thinking about the question, “What, then, was the moment the web clicked for you?”

    TLDR: PHP allowed the content of a web page to be different depending on what the person had entered on the previous page – absolute magic.

    A bit of a rewind for context. I should have been a computer nerd, early doors. I blew it.

    My childhood (did I rewind too much?) computing experience started with the ZX81 (programme your own lunar lander game from a magazine!), then a ZX Spectrum (Manic Miner!). Then things took an educational shift. Our next computer was a BBC Micro (then Electron) – I loved Elite but was envious of my friends playing Hunchback on the Commadore 64. I blame my Mum, who was promoting the use of computers for the centre for adults with additional support needs that she managed. This was in the 80s! Incredibly, she got funding for a machine showing the BBC Doomsday project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project) that could be used at the centre. I got to use it. It was mind blowing with 3D journey through historical documents.

    All this exposure and computers still didn’t click for me. I went off to University to be awful and English, Philosophy and Psychology.

    After University, while working on an admin job on a project to open up Scotland’s canals, I read about MS Access and built a contact database for the engineers. It was probably rubbish, I can’t remember. What I do remember was that I loved that it was logical and that it produced something people could use.

    I signed up for an accelerated degree (they were desperate for computer people at this point – would even take art students and offered a grant) in Multimedia Communication at Paisley University.

    It was a great course that covered all the essentials (Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash and Director). It even covered SMIL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integration_Language), which I still like.

    We built basic web pages, which was so rewarding (handing our files over to the lab technician on a 1Mb 3.5″ disc who would FTP it to the server [we watched in real, real, long time as it uploaded] to the server. But then, whoa, we could view it on the Internet.

    This was all fun, we even got introduced to JavaScript! Hell, that looked complicated (looking back, they didn’t even tackle CSS apart from the odd inline thing LOL).

    However, THE MOMENT THE WEB CLICKED FOR ME was during the PHP server-side class where we could submit a form and produce a page that reflected what was put in that form. Wow! I could see it was like providing a basic template but people could fill it in in infinite ways (that’s a lot of “ins”). A bit like the Berol doodle art posters (as big a part of my childhood as Herbie goes bananas).

    Turns out I’m now a front end developer but that is what got me started and still gives me a buzz to this day.

    Apologies for way too much information but I hope it’s an interesting read.

    Cheers, Patrick

    Reply
  2. bokep indonesia Avatar
    bokep indonesia

    Oh my goodness! Impressive article dude! Thanks, However I am
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    Thanx!!

    Reply

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