Microsoft presents version 1.0 of its website for #ThrowbackThursday

"Twenty years ago, there was no Facebook, of course, no eBay, no Amazon, no Wikipedia. It was Web less-than-1.0," she said.

 

Choney noted Trent Walton and Dave Rupert, who helped redesign Microsoft's present homepage, celebrated the site's 20th anniversary by recreating the 1994 page from scratch.

 

Rupert likened it to "an archaeological dig, digging through dinosaur bones, to find out how they did this then.”

 

“It seems really simple, but we had to kind of peel back the years and go down to 1994 technology – where your browser doesn’t support images, for example,” he said.

 

He added that in 1994, "it was more of a triumph to have a Web page in and of itself, whether or not an image was attached.”

 

Building up community

 

Ingalls said one reason Microsoft set up its website in 1994 was to establish its knowledge base online.

 

“We had started to build up a community there; people would answer questions for each other,” he said.

 

Also at the time, he was the only staff at the site, and was later joined by Steve Heaney as "vacation relief."

 

Yet, those days did not provide much by way of “Web design,” and HTML was something alien to most people.

 

Data for the site was so small that the information for the site then could fit into 3.5-inch floppy disks whose capacities pale in comparison to today's flash drives.

 

“For a while, we ran the site like a newspaper, where we published content twice a day. And if you missed the cutoff for the publishing deadline, you didn’t get it published until the next running of the presses, or however you want to term it,” Ingalls recalled.

 

Fast-forward 20 years later, and the site now has 30 people on the homepage alone.

 

"If you think about the huge range of audience that comes to our website, it’s a unique challenge," said Chris Balt, Microsoft.com product manager.

 

Balt added the present site gets 20 to 30 million visits a month.

 

For the future

 

Meanwhile, Walton said the present Microsoft.com’s responsive design is how more websites would likely be in the future.

 

“The idea is that we need to build things more simply so that they work in more places, as well as on more kinds of devices. These days it’s not just computers and phones that can access the Internet, but things like cars, glasses, watches," he said.

 

"Web design is about building a really solid website that be accessed by as many different types of devices as possible. No one wants to be told where and how to access the site – they want to do it on their terms. If they’re on a phone, they want to do it that way; if they’re on a desktop with a 27-inch monitor, they want to do it that way. So, it’s up to us provide the experiences they want,” he added. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News