Website Development

Old age and treachery…

Despite all of one’s efforts to backup and preserve the history of things, sometimes things just sink into that hazy area where one really can not be sure when something occurred. Such is the early history of the website Ki2.com.

I recall that I obtained the domain name shortly after Network Solutions was authorized to issue domain names to the pubic at large and charge a price for them. Prior to February of 1986 only organizations that participated in the ARPA Network were entitled to register domain names. Between 1986 and 1995 domain names could be registered without cost. In the mid 1990s the demand for domain names exploded and it was no longer feasible to maintain the infrastructure for controlling them at no cost to the user. In September of 1995 Networks Solutions was authorized to issue domain names for a price and by 1997 all possible three character .com domain names had been registered.

Since I recall having paid to register Ki2.com that pretty much targets the time frame for it’s original registration. Fortunately, in today’s data rich world one does not need to depend on one’s own memory to track such things. By consulting the global “Memex” that we all share we find that there is a service Whois that can provide this information to you. Using this, it turns out that Ki2.com was originally registered on July 30, 1996. This year it will be 26 years old.

Twenty four days later on August 24, 1996 the Windows NT 4.0 Server was launched to retail and with it the Web Server, Internet Information Service 2.0. With this introduction also came a set of server extensions that Microsoft had acquired with the purchase of Vemeer Technologies, Incorporated earlier that year. These extensions eventually named Front Page Server Extensions (FPSE) provided a “What You See is What you Get” (WYSIWYG) mode of web site generation and provided a smooth method to deploy web sites that were generated locally to servers running in locations capable of being accessed by the the global “Internet”.

The early days of web hosting were something of a “Wild West Show”, Ki2.com was first hosted on an Apache Server and the content was uploaded using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for publishing it from a locally staged site to the remote globally accessible site. When Microsoft NT4 servers became available a painful learning curve was triggered as hosting services were unfamiliar with the “New Technology” and their unfamiliarity with Server Extensions made the use of Front Page as a web content generator something of a frustration. It was relatively straightforward to get a site working and looking the way you wanted it to look locally only to find that when it was deployed to the “Production” environment for serving up to the world that unexpected issues occurred.

This was a time when network connections were not available at most locations. When connectivity did start to be available it was in the form of low speed dial-up connections that would need to be established each time they were needed. Eventually it was possible to get a “dial-up” connection that was designed to be permanently active and speeds began to advance. A high speed connection in these days might have been 56000 kbps. For those who don’t have a calculator on hand that is about 20000 times slower than the 1 gbps link one might have today. In real terms, something that takes a second now might take hours then. Needless to say in those days efficiency was critical if one wanted to host a web site that responded fast enough to not frustrate the user.

This brings “Your Humble Trail Blazer” to the reason for bookmarking this piece of history. In the beginning, bandwidth was precious, memory was precious, machine processing time was precious and knowledge of the emerging technology was in short supply. Expertise in network configuration and optimization was hard to find and the worldwoide web and it’s endless source of information was in it’s infancy. No going to YouTube and finding hundreds of videos on the topic you needing information about.

In those days, Simplicity was king and perhaps it is still king even though resources such as memory and bandwidth are exponentially less expensive than they were then. Given the tools and technologies that are available today it is easy for practicitioners to have limited visibility on the underlying complexity and cost in memory, processing power and bandwidth that the tradeoffs they make in design a system will have.

Whatever one’s preferred form of Database Server is, it can be spun up in a matter of minutes in Azure or AWS. The choice to do so may or may not even be questioned, but the impact will be significant in terms of monthly cost and the processing power needed to execute the application. Wordpress may be pretty. It may be easily accessable in terms of design tools and hosting options, but it requires a database and even though they may be cheap, compute resources are not free and will always need to be paid for in terms of “gold” and “energy”. Perhaps some mental energy is saved by the tools that make the implementations accessable, but there is always a price.

To conclude this portion of our journey, when “Your Humble Trail Blazer” set out to find the end of the trail of workflow and tools that started with text editors, Front Page, DotNetNuc,.ASP, Wordpress and a variety of others over the decades, it was simplicity, efficency and minimum cost in terms of “gold” and “energy” that was on the menu.

I can not guarantee that you won’t run into bumps in the road or that everything discussed here will be applicable to your siutuation or even if it is 100% accurate in all situations, but it is what I have come to understand and the fact that this site is here is evidence that it “works for me”. If you find something that is inaccurate, please reach out so that the inaccuracy can be rectified.

David Mamet said that “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.”. Part of that may be that “Old Age” recognizes it’s limitations and develops techniques to overcome them. In this case, if the process isn’t clear and simple, youth can power through and use it, but age needs to find a simpler solution. Namaste.