Comment by markh
5 years ago
This brings back memories... I was the technical half of a two person team who built the very first Thomas Cook website in 1995. Of course, e-commerce was a step too far at the time, but there was much excitement when the spec for HTML frames came out mid-project (don’t judge).
> e-commerce was a step too far at the time
I remember those times. A number of companies in the UK saw web-sites as extensions to their teletext based advertising, just with more information density and a few small pictures (emphasis on both few and small: most of their customers were using ~28k8 connections at home and/or overcommitted shared connections in collages & libraries). You were sill expected to phone in your order, or physically go to your local branch, once you had seen something that took your fancy.
eCommerce was happening at that point (Amazon started in '94 IIRC, and the gambling & other adult entertainment industries were already actively making moves in that realm), but it was in its early days and far from trusted by either the public or many companies.
Ha I can recall in early 95 excitedly explaining to our customer in BT that we had Tables for layout and could change the background colour now
This was an intranet site was launched in 94, we don't talk about bt.com
28.8Kbps dialup was a different time. I think teletext holidays were popular then.
There’s no shame in HTML frames in 1995.
Frames reloading in background is how I managed to create some interactivity before XMLHttpRequest. No idea if there would have been some better way at the time.