30 years of Mink Machine

30 years is a very long time. When I think back, 1994 was an interesting year (read this in the voice of Connor MacLeod from The Highlander).

In 1994, the Allied occupation of Berlin formally ended. Kurt Cobain was found dead. The Channel Tunnel opened between England and France. Premiere of Tarantino’s second movie Pulp Fiction. Jeff Bezos founded a company called Amazon. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated. Nine Inch Nails released a second album called The Downward Spiral. The first PlayStation by Sony was released.

When it comes to the internet side of things, 1994 saw the initial release of graphical browser Netscape Navigator, one year before the first version of Internet Explorer was released. This was a whole decade before Zeldman released his highly influential book Designing with web standards, which would ignite the rebellion in the web war.

Among all these events, this site happened to be created, exactly 30 years ago. I sat down one evening and wrote a bunch of HTML markup in Emacs editor on a Solaris computer, oblivious to the consequences.

Writing on my book surrounded by Basque pintxos.

In 1994, there were just a few thousand websites on the internet, an age of scarce resources for developers. This was 4 years before Google was started, 9 years before Git was invented, 9 years before YouTube was founded and 12 years before Spotify was founded. There was of course no Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Stack Overflow and all of those things that modern developers and creators take for granted.

There were no flat screens, smartphones or wifi. A normal internet connection with 14.4 kbps modem meant that a single image could take a minute to download.

Writing a blog post somewhere in Hiroshima, Japan.

Somehow, we ended up where we are today. A gloriously tangled mess of streamed content, proprietary gardens and infinite layers of module dependencies in an abundance of frameworks.

But there is still some fun left in the world, so I guess I will be lurking around for a while longer. Thanks to everyone tuning in at any time during these three decades!