Wildscreen 96
In the mid-90's we were working with a number of individuals, companies and
groups in the Film and TV professions in Bristol.
At one point I gave a demonstration of the principles of the Avon Internet Business Park (AIBP) to David Puttnam (since knighted).
We did the Wildscreen '96 film festival website on a volunteer basis. At that time the Internet held mainly promise and charitable causes were often reluctant to devote limited budget to unproven technology.
If asked, we were usually more than happy to knock up a few pages if they supplied the text and graphics. In the AIBP (see above), we were on a mission to bring the Net to Bristol businesses, usually this involved creating a modest website to display their specific content.
We found that websites only started to make sense to people if they could see their content organised and displayed in web pages. During '95 and '96 I must have built somewhere around sixty basic websites as individual technology demonstrators for various businesses and trade organisations.
It might seem a little extreme for a researcher to spend so much time on a mundane task like building demonstrator websites, but in '95 the Internet was still very new to most people outside the domain of computing.
I recall a visit to HPLabs in '95 by the technology hack of the UK's premier financial magazine. No names, no pack drill, but for the sake of argument we'll call it The Economist. I asked him about the status of their Internet presence. He dismissed the WorldWideWeb as a niche technology, in his opinion it would turn out to be just a "flash in the pan". I counted myself fortunate *not* to be a subscriber. (Unfortunately, many of HPLabs senior management apparently were ... but that's another story.)
This was Wildscreen's first website. Two years later they were in a position to decide to put the website on a properly funded footing.
That's the eye of a parrot fish, in case you were wondering.