Dave The Web Guy

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Ye Olde Computer Support Website

08/21/2020

I never went on to develop web pages or to code at professional grade levels, but for as long as the web has been a thing I have always developed web pages and coded. Here are two videos (you'll need to full-screen these bitches to see them completely) showing off some work I did for the computer support department that I worked for from the mid-90s to about 2006.

Ye Olde Computer Support Website Nostalgia 1 (Watch full-screen).

Ye Olde Computer Support Website Nostalgia 2 (Watch full screen).

I worked at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida, which at the time had an independent (versus campus-centralized), computer support center. There was a small crew of us supporting maybe 200 users or up to 500 PCs in that specific research building.

Back then formal lines between technical roles were not as defined or regulated, or, at least weren't for our small shop, yet. A system administrator might just as easily be called on to install MS Office on a user's PC, as they might to add a printer to a server -- and vice versa. Roles solidified in my 5 or 6 years there, but early on, anything was on the table in your role as a "PC tech".

If you could log into it, you were the dude doing it.

Under this liberal arrangement I at some point picked up the role as webmaster of the departmental website. It was a natural for me because it did in fact involve coding (HTML and the old "Cold Fusion", AKA, the language of MySpace - fun fact), and it allowed me to craft in departmental service structure directly to the interface that people would be using to call upon it. The website, to the extent I had control, was in effect support policy and procedure. For years this worked out well.

I was able to take this trip down memory lane using a weird archive site I had not heard of before called oldweb.today .

Looking at this today it's stunning how static my web skills have stayed. You'll notice that my preference for the clean uncluttered mechanical social path between the various pages is the same you'll find, say, here at my very blog. I have always preferred that a website look and behave like a document.

By Dave for Personal Blog.