History

This is the fifth version of Henry Wagner's World which began in April 1994.

I first began my homepage in the spring of 1994 (seems like eons ago in Net years) while I was at Hofstra University. The first version was simple, using a limited set of HTML codes I made links to some of my favorite sites, U2 and Star Wars information, cool companies who got an early start on the Web, and links to my friends at Hofstra who began creating their own pages. At this time we didn't even have a real Web server up and running, just a bunch of directories in a public area on one of Hofstra's SGI workstations. As time went by and we wanted others to see our work so we twisted the arm of the System Administrator and got the NCSA httpd server up. You'll be amazed at what you can get done when you just keep bugging the sys admins, but once I started doing system administration this theory came back to haunt me.

Well as I kept adding more links it became evident that I needed to break the site up, and the more I surfed the Web the more ideas I got, so in the fall of 1994 I reorganized the site, plus I added in some new graphics for headers and buttons to make it look nice. Also it was around this time that a little company called NetScape release a beta version of a browser called Mozilla (remember the spinning M logo?, my favorite logo until IE 3.0 came out). This gave even more layout control with a new set of HTML codes so I took advantage of these.

In May 1995 I graduated from Hofstra and I needed to find a new home for my site (somehow the admins at Hofstra didn't appreciate my taking up 500 megs for rendered POV animations so they deleted all my accounts) so I moved to Panix one of New York's oldest, and biggest, Internet Service Providers. By this time I was already working fulltime at Erin/Edwards so I redesigned my site once again to take advantage of everything I was learning from the art and design people. I removed some old sections and expanded my U2 and POV sections. The largest addition being the Interactive U2 Discography which contains more than 450 items. This database was generated by a C program I developed and is controlled by a series of Perl scripts to give the user exactly what their looking for.

As I approached two years of developing for the Web and more than three and a half years the Net I decided it was time for another redesign. Version 4 contained more than new graphics, I added in Shockwave animations and Java applets to enhance the look of the site, plus additional Perl scripts to improve the behind the scenes work. This version was designed to take advantage of all the features in NetScape 2.0.

In the summer of 1996 I started working for InterWorld and on version 5, my most ambitious version yet. This version is still in progress in will contain Style Sheets, ActiveX, VRML, Shockwave and Java.