Tom:
We [didn’t 00:04:58] go over this story before, and we may have talked about it drunkenly in the pub before, but it’s actually surprisingly similar. All it is, is there’s about fifteen years difference. I suppose I also was always into art and stuff. I always drew a lot when I was a kid, so I’ve always been a fairly creative person, and I’ve always done little things at school to try new skills and learn bits and bobs based around design, and art, and writing, and all that. When I was at school the internet wasn’t really a thing. I left school in 1997. I made my first website … Well, I don’t know. 1998 maybe. It might have been ’97 as well. I’m not [inaudible 00:05:40] long time ago it’s just kind of hard to remember.
I suppose when I was sixteen or something we got our first email address. Maybe it’s quite hard for people to realize how much has changed in that time, so even in 2007 for me that was well into when web has been around for quite some time and it still wasn’t anywhere near like it is now. I remember the first website I ever looked at, I mean the reason why I got into web was because I’m a failed programmer really, and some people think I can code, but I wouldn’t say that at all. I know the bare bones.
Russell:
No comment.
Tom:
Be nice. I had started out trying to be a … I was so crap at it I don’t even remember what it’s called. Delphi maybe, [if 00:06:27] that’s a programming language. I don’t know. Maybe. Someone will tell me that’s wrong, but I got a job where they were like, “Learn this.” Gave me a book and sat me down. I just [inaudible 00:06:36] about basically. I couldn’t really do it, and so from there they said, “Do you want to make us a website?” I said, “Well, yeah. I’ve seen a few of them. They look pretty cool.” I looked at the code and was like, “I can definitely do that.” Pretty simple stuff, and it went from there.
The beauty of it for me was it’s something that’s creative, you can make it look nice, although my first website ever I can remember what it looked like, and it did not look nice. A lot of animated gifs.
Russell:
No one has a nice looking first website.
Tom:
There was the classic late ’90’s “send us an email” link that moved. It was a GIF. I wish it was still around. Maybe we can find it on the Internet Archive.
Russell:
That would be a good [side 00:07:14] page.
Tom:
I do remember the second one I made actually being quite nice, and I feel like it would hold its own now, but that is rose-tinted spectacles if you ever did hear of them. Yeah, so I kind of just, I don’t want to say through necessity getting into it, but I was out of school, had done all right, but I didn’t really know where to go. I didn’t go to university. I wasn’t really interested because I had a bit of a crap time towards the end and wasn’t interested in furthering my education but left school thinking, “What do I do now?” I was like, “Oh, well I can do computers.” Had a similar experience at school where I did computing for an A level, but the teachers knew less than us, which was amazing. We actually got a couple of them sacked which was … and got worse ones in their place.
Russell:
Really?
Tom:
All that great education.
Russell:
Where are the good teachers for this sort of stuff?
Tom:
I don’t know.
Russell:
Maybe they’re around now.
Tom:
That was the ’90s and computing was very different then as it is now. I was lucky to go to a school where there were a lot of computing things there, but I remember back then that computing wasn’t really a thing that was taught a lot, and certainly because the web and web design didn’t really exist, there were not courses in that kind of thing at all. Like, it just didn’t exist, because one of the cool things of being in it for that long is that actually, as this was happening, a lot of what, I mean there’s still new stuff happening all the time, but the bare bones of what we do now. I remember there being no CSS, right?
Russell:
Yeah.
Tom:
That’s like a completely different story to how it is now.
Russell:
Massive. Yeah.
Tom:
Now there’s a new JavaScript library every now and then, and a new framework in PHP or whatever, like a new way to do stuff, but that was kind of like, “This isn’t even a thing yet.” So I’m making these really terrible sites using font tags and tables and all that.
Russell:
Unknowingly terrible though, because at the time …
Tom:
I could tell they weren’t that great at the time, but I suppose you look back and the work me and many people did back then you’d laugh at now, but there just wasn’t the technology, so it’s very interesting to see how that’s all changed and actually … I suppose that brings us onto the other thing we’re going to talk about, or one of the other things, is that when I was growing up doing this it was seen as like there was all this new stuff happening all the time, but there really wasn’t any resource out there to learn, so you had to go out and just find stuff. There was no courses, nothing like that to take in.
There are a few people sort of … I don’t even remember how I found out stuff back then. I think it was just sitting in front of a computer trying to do something and maybe looking at the one or two website out there that gave you, “This is what a marquee tag does.” Like, that kind of thing. You must have had quite a lot out there to draw from when you were learning.