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Comment by acherion | Hacker News Reader

I learnt HTML purely because I was sick of waiting for Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Double-clicking on the Netscape Composer icon in Program Manager would cause my hard drive to thrash for a solid 5 minutes, before the screen would update with _some_ resemblance of a Netscape window.

There's gotta be a better way to create web pages -- so I learnt HTML and was using notepad.exe to hand-craft my HTML pages. I would then copy them to disk (usually using ARJ.EXE to compress everything), and then go to school to use their internet connection to upload my pages to Geocities.

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> Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1.

Bleedin' Nora: that's certainly an optimistic system configuration for that application. I'm not surprised you lost patience with it.

I remember using a real mixed bag of tools to create HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s. Started off with Notepad but stayed away from Communicator until I had a PC powerful enough to run it easily (early y2k).

I also briefly tried exporting Word documents as HTML, which I think might have been new in Office 2000. This was a bad idea: the markup was hugely bloated, and images were primarily embedded as ActiveX objects that only looked good in IE, with heavily downscaled/coloured versions available for other browsers. Similar issues with Frontpage.

But I found the markup generated by Composer to be pretty clean by the standards of the time, so developed a hybrid workflow where I'd rough out pages, along with their content, in composer, and then tweak the markup manually.

I also remember finding a really nice text editor for working with web pages. It came free on a magazine cover CD and I wish I could remember what it was called [EDIT: it might have been HoTMetaL]. For editing raw HTML and JavaScript nothing could better it. It wasn't as good as VSCode + the right extensions today but, for the time, it was literally streets ahead. So I ended up using that + Composer for at least a couple of years, up until maybe 2002.

Word 97 has sensible export to basic HTML. No specific web page editing tools, but allows conversion of text content of existing documents in bulk. Search for

  <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">

Later versions of Office use HTML as some kind of complete document serialization format. The website

http://mc-computing.com/HTML_Examples/html_Generators.htm

reminds that there exist Microsoft's own clean-up tool (without doubt, an internal pet project which became essential), “Office 2000 HTML Filter”.

Thanks, I stand corrected. The export from Word 2000 was anything but basic. And it did, as far as possible, seem to try to serialize most aspects of the document. Which, of course, is not really what you want from a 1999/2000 web page that most people would view over dial-up.

I suspect their target market with this was enterprise intranets where everybody would be forced to use IE, and therefore all the ActiveX garbage would render just fine... and given LAN bandwidth most people probably wouldn't notice the ridiculously large payload sizes (for the era) of these pages.

I didn't know about the HTML filter though because I only experimented with the export once or twice, during the evenings after lectures, which was enough to convince me I was heading down a dead-end path.

That's basically the system I had in the mid nineties, though it had 8MB of RAM and was running OS/2 (2.1 to 3). I edited HTML on it in Emacs, mainly. Eight Megs And Continually Swapping was very accurate at that time.

I remember my mate's dad bought a 233MHz Pentium II system with 32MB of RAM some time in 1997, and our minds were all absolutely blown by the incomprehensible power of this system.

I want to say before that, back in 94, he'd had some sort of 486 variant (might have been a 486SX 33 or something along those lines - fairly run of the mill for mid-'94) with 4MB of RAM back in '94, and I want to say it got upgraded to 8MB, that we played a lot of DOOM and DOOM II on, and I think there'd maybe been a stop at a Pentium system somewhere in the middle because I remember we played Quake round at his place, and I'm sure that was earlier than '97. I'm not sure the 486 lasted that long - maybe only a year or 18 months - before it was replaced with a Pentium I system, but my memory is hazy.

I do remember the Pentium II though because, for the time, it was such a beast of a system. I do remember it seeming completely ridiculous and like you'd never need that much computing power. Oh sweet summer child, etc.

At that time, 486 was probably the minimum target they would expect it to run on. Pentiums had also started to become more affordable by 1997.

Sure, it was very ambitious to run something like a 16-bit version of Composer on such a low spec machine, but I still gave it a go :D

This was around 1995. I didn’t suffer too long with Composer on my 386, I got sick of the swapping pretty quickly and stuck with Notepad for a long time afterwards.

I didn’t upgrade my 386 PC until 1998 (couldn’t afford to), when I got a Cyrus 6x86, which is another story altogether. If you know about Quake and FPU performance with the 6x86, then you already know the story.

I had a 486 SX2, and not DX2, so I feel your pain regarding math and games...

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