I was recently going through some old file archives, and discovered a complete copy of a website I started in 1993 to host information on OSU Oceanography’s research ship R/V Wecoma. It ran on a Solaris box on my desk at Oregon State University and used the NCSA HTTPd server. Think pre-Linux, pre-Apache, pre-PHP and pre-Perl. Think when Yahoo’s address was at Stanford and hosted on Akebono.
I set up the site to check out this “web thing”, and decided to put the ship’s cruise planning manual on the site. Previously, the manual was only available in printed form and on request. Any scientists thinking of or planning to use the ship got a copy. Of course putting it on the web made it far more accessable to the public.
What’s interesting to me is the structure (or lack therein) of the site as well as the graphics. Following around the hypertextification does lead to a bit of the “You are in a maze of twisty little passages all the same” feeling. The icons I must say though have held their own in an interesting retro way. I recall using some kind of pixel paint program running under Solaris at the time. Any photos were scanned on a hard to get to scanner that was locked away in a lab across campus.
Alas the “Finger the Ship” system no longer functions. I had put the ship on the net while it was in port, and then had a script running on the ship that could capture local water temperature, winds, salinity and a few other numbers. If you fingered the ship you’d get the latest ship stats.
Anyway, here is the site. Ah and for comparison, here is the ship’s current website.