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For me it was a teacher showing his basic web page at the school's computer lab. I wanted to do the same! He showed me how to edit the source in Notepad, and watch the result in IE. To get me started, he gave me a floppy disk with a single index.html file with some tags. I played around with that for ages.

To actually host the page, ~10 old me didn't know what to do. But a relative in Denmark had suddenly become the "webmaster" for her local government, and gotten to learn some stuff.

Remotely teaching me ftp or ssh was out of the question, but I got tipped about Tripod/Lycos. They had an online interface where I could upload a file! And then later she showed me how to apply for dot.tk and have my very own domain. Very cool 8)

Was a bit dormant, though. What more could I do than adding some texts and under construction gifs?

Then the Harry Potter craze hit. Lots of people made cool websites, and I wanted to join! To up the game, me and a friend made stuff in FrontPage. Still manually uploading one and one file through Tripod's web interface. I could do so much more than the little HTML I had managed to do in Notepad! Then I later got to spend a day shadowing a professional web developer, and she gave me the CD for the previous version of Dreamweaver! First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.

As many others, my Harry Potter page was a "school" where people could do stuff and earn house points. But not knowing programming, everything was static and I had to manually edit and reupload files. Luckily only like two friends used the page hehe. But other HP pages were dynamic! How? I had to learn PHP!

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As an aside, it's curious how many of those professionals I interacted with the first years were women. Companies/govagencies felt they needed a presence, but didn't care much, and just gave the task to someone else already doing communication/admin work. And they learned on the job and suddenly became the first experts here.

> First I used the wysiwyg mode, but then discovered the editor had auto completion! Suddenly I could write HTML properly.

I think this is more or less an argument in favor of tools that are helpful to the developer, like feature rich IDEs with parameter hints and autocomplete/suggestions, text editors with plugins that give you a similar experience or even a little bit of AI help.

Some people have the attitude that you might want to learn a language/framework with just a text editor to know the internals, but I think that if you want results fast and focus on solving problems (getting the site up and running) quickly, then tools like these are invaluable!

Yeah, for me being a noob it was hard to learn as I didn't know what and where to start. Not much material, at least not in my native language and suitable for a kid. So I learned by brute-force. I applied each and every auto-complete CSS-statement and looked what it did. I didn't know or think of there actually being a reference somewhere online. But testing them, I found the "cool" ones (especially border style, applied it to everything!) and could use them.

Don't you love it how these were the times when you approached someone you didn't even know and he gave you SSH access to his server, just like that? That's also my experience from that era - somehow people trusted each other more back then and I also got access to one company's server just from hanging on their IRC channel and trying to be helpful.

Exactly. I had an open (read/write) ftp server in beginning of the nineties. It was nice, people could put files in there, retrieve what they wanted.

By the middle of the nineties I had to write-protect everything and leave only an "incoming" directory with write access, because some jerk deleted everything just for fun.

By the end of the nineties I was fed up with everyone trying to use my "incoming" directory for storing warez/pr0n so I gave up (yes I tried setting it write-only but what's the point ?). Well, it was fine while it lasted, the community of people on the internet definitely changed in a few years, and it didn't get any better in the following decades.

Most people are good™ and have good™ intentions. This works well in small circles. But a small number of people isn't that good and thanks to internet and all be connected the bad have lots of power and destroy it, while being a small minority ...

Mine to. I use to use those hacking challenge websites ngsec, try2hack.nl and then ended up with talking to a Dutch guy who set me up a old box out of generosity hosted on his home net somewhere in NL.

  > I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it
  > is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.

Good thing you had no hard dependency on <blink>!

Nothing a little CSS can't fix:

  blink {
   text-decoration: blink;
   animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
   -webkit-animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite;
  }
  @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }
  @-webkit-keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }

ssh in 1997 was pretty advanced! I think they were the days when people started the campaign against telnet and rcp in favor of ssh.

Yeah, the Mitnick hack of Shimomura (rsh + predictable TCP seq #s) was already out there due to that incident's publicity.

How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?

Was SSH even a thing then? Or was it still telnet in those days?

ssh was created in 1995 by a Finnish university researcher at the University of Helsinki, his name is Tatu Ylönen :)

Likewise, IRC was also created by a fellow finn back in 1988, Jarkko "Wiz" Oikarinen, at the University of Oulu.

Wasn't git also created by some Finn? He had another, earlier, side project in university I think. Not something big and professional like GNU.

Are you thinking about Subsurface? I wonder what happened to that guy.

i think he was talking about the minix clone called freax i think.

i haven't heard anything about it since. it was just a hobby. and it wasn't very useful anyways because it only supported AT harddisks and the license didn't allow commercial use.

Yeah, that one. AT harddisks only and NOT portable.

In 1997, SSH was relatively new, a couple years old (looked it up).

It did spread very quickly, as the issue it solves was quite obvious and there weren't a lot of competing solutions. So it's pretty possible that that was the actual tech used.

In the late 90s I used telnet to a unit machine of some sort to manage my websites. In 2000 I went to uni and we were told to use rlogin!

In my experience, it wasn't until 2003ish that telnet really started getting replaced by SSH, with telnet access being routinely shut down. My memory is really more around dev environments, prod envs may have been a lot more locked down.