The Netmark Group Scan 1993

I often make the joke, when I started designing websites in Tennessee in the Early 1990’s, some of my competitors were not even born or had just started Kindergarten! Many professions have been around for centuries. This is not true with website design! I ran across some images I scanned in 1993 for a company I worked for in Murfreesboro, TN called the Netmark Group that sold ad specialties. When I created this website, it cost  a whopping 100.00 for two years to register a domain name through Network Solutions. There was no Godaddy, or Google and Netscape was the browser I used. Many domain names that later sold for millions, were still available at that time! I wish I could go back in time and register some of those domain names in the early 1990’s!

Fortunately, I went to a great high school in the small town of Oliver Springs, TN. My computer teacher was the late Terry Hacker, who later became principal of Oliver Springs High School. And yes, that was his real last name, “Hacker” as he was affectionately called by many! I actually came back to “OZ” as we called it, and Mr. Hacker let me use the 2,000.00 scanner at the school to scan some of the images now shown on this blog for the site I was developing, or building as we said at that time. I will post several of those original scans in this blog. The biggest images I have were about 500 pixels wide, which was just about full screen on a monitor 640×480 VGA monitor! It also took a long time to scan an image and copy it.

Something else I remember was the painfully slow dial-up modems. At that time, many people were on 9600 baud and I remember when I started at MTSU I had a 2400 baud modem! I actually have a post archived on Usenet from 1993 talking about a Compucom 9600 baud modem I had. I do sort of miss the sound of the modem connecting though!

I’m curious about your “old school” website design or internet stories, so if you would, comment below and let everyone reading know your story!