..This website was established and founded 25 years ago... on
December 1, 1999
A lot has changed on the website and in the internet World. A short overview of this website history....
I bought as aerospace engineering student at Delft University of Technology my first AMSTRAD PC 8086 clone with my friend Marcel with MS-DOS operating system. We did "PC Sharing" as it costed 5,000 guilders (2,500 USD) and each week our PC was loaded in my old FIAT and moved to our student' home and vice versa. We programmed at the Delft University in ALGOL on the VAX mainframe and tried various programming languages at our PC in FORTAN, COBOL, C, PASCAL, Prolog and also html, a first internet web language. We soon bought a hard disk, cooling the processor with our home made cooling fan with duct about 2 meters from the PC mother board to avoid distortion. In 1988 I also started programming in ADA.
In 1991 a first internet site was live made at the CERN European Nuclear Research Agency bij Tim Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web internet was born but at the time private individuals did not have internet access as it was very expensive.
Setting up a personal website was enabled by the pioneering hosting service XS4ALL "access for all" in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In the USA Yahoo was one of the pioneers. XS4ALL established in 1993 offered a limited "home" page at their webserver to store your website. Max space allowed was 2 MB. They had a good reputation with respect for privacy and freedom and no commercial advertising.
I got a payed XS4ALL account with username "designer" and URL address was thus http://home.xs4all.nl/~designer (that later changed). My username dictated the "~designer" URL name. At the time, I had no own domain name, only companies could affort these at the time.
I was lucky that I lived in Amsterdam with one of the biggest internet connection hubs so had a pretty quick connection at that, time.
For any "remember the noise"..., analog uploading webpages and content simple modems were used, needing turning off the live "talking" phone line and setting up the connection at some 1 US Dollar/ 2 Guilder per 60 minutes at 4800 bps.
Webpage programming was done in .html code in MS DOS with a text DOS editor.
Any photographs for the content had to scanned with my flat bed scanner from photos, I had no digital camera for the JPG format yet. The scanned photo had to be reduced in size. A jpg file was at the time preferable not bigger than 50kb otherwise webpage loading by a surfer abroad would take too much time and people would go elsewhere.
On 1 December 1999, I uploaded a few .html webpages with FTP through my analog modem to my "home" webserver space.
A year later I bought my first SONY Cybershot digital camera which costed some 2,000 guilders (1,000 USD) at the time.
Regarding websurfing, one had to watch out for surfing too long as you payed PER MINUTE for your connection! Again, at some 1 US Dollar/ 2 Guilder per 60 minutes. Soon, the connection costs dropped with increased surfing speeds. Internet forums as common today were "non existent", then USENET pages like rec.models.scale were active about plastic scale modelling. Using USENET required special browsers and accounts at the time. And no Facebook or other (a)social media existed at the time.
I had to set up the .index page as home target page for navigation.
Focus is on aircraft modelling of aircraft that (first) flew after 1945 in 1/72 and 1/32 scales.
Pioneering pages were about the 1/32 Revell Tornado and prototypes. The typical subjects were military aircraft used in Dutch service, American aircraft, British aircraft and a few Soviet aircraft.
A few personal webpages were also made. The first few months, some 10 webpages were live with very small .jpg pictures to enable quick loading for visitors across the Globe. But the html code had to be manually programmed so not a lot of pages were completed each month.
In 2002 I also became co-webmaster of the IPMS The Netherlands website that also had been established by Eric around 2000. WWW.IPMS.NL was also hosted at XS4ALL.
Scale plastic modelling was the main hobby and many of my "designer" webpages were updated over the following years as more .jpg images became available as I had re-purchased the same kits and could make photos from boxes, sprues and more.
Soon, the website started to grow quicker. Important was that now a simple html view editor was available that helped coding. I think it was a Netscape editor that I used.
As models were purchased, photos were made of the kit content and the modelling progress in steps photographed. A real modelling report was now possible with tips and improvements while building the model.
From 2002 it was possible to monitor a few statistics, suggesting about 1,500 views a month. A lot of views at the time for a small personal modelling home page.
It is estimated that each month 500 modellers regularly visit the website and an additional 1000 others when seeking specific aircraft scale models through internet search engines.
Internet speeds grew and allowed bigger jpg files. So a few pages with real aircraft walk around were also published. At the time walk arounds were popular along scale modellers and published on internet.
Social media also were founded around 2003 and play now a big role (also quite negative) on the internet. But my old fashioned website is independent, add free and hosted on secure privacy guaranteed hosting environments in The Netherlands. No cookie tracking whatsoever.
The website aircraft modelling focus became broader around 2015, now focussing on the World Air Forces after 1945. The aim became to make at least 1 model of each World Air Force with some 204 listed. But also other aircraft models "flown after 1945" in 1/72 and 1/32 scales.
As of 2024, both sites still run with similar content. It is also a way to have better availability of 100% and back-up. Webspace is now over 1,8 GB (so 900 times bigger than the first site).
End 2024 after 25 years, some 32,000 files and over 550 webpages are on the site showing modelling reports of over 600 built models.
Generally, the site (and shadow site) is expanded with new modelling reports about 4 times/ month listed on the What is new page....
Enjoy modelling and enjoy visiting the website.
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Created this page
December 1, 2024