History [from "Speak Easy Sitez to the Streaming Twenty oh, oh's. An Illustrated History of the First 52,680 Hours On-line. - A Children's Book."]

The first web sitez were hand drawn and painstakingly painted one pixel at a time [see fig.1 c1994].This process was often labourious and very expensive. Each web sitez or "site", as they have now come to be known, took 4-5 months-- that's nearly 2 months or 8 metric weeks longer then a "web" or internet year!" The designs were often crude and colourless.

In these heady early days EPIC was a maverick, often rebuked, seen as non conformist and a potentially dangerous influence on the aesthetic (moral) standards of the young web. "This will lead to the commercialization of the UUNet!" cried the purists.

What the traditional ad and design agencies perceived as the crippling limitations of the medium's technology (production and design using something like MS Excel), EPIC envisioned as an opportunity with potential extending as far as the 3rd quarter the fiscal year 2000. The technological limitations of bandwidth, development tools and client side issues meant that there was a universal leveling of the playing field. Production value, became the unconscious yardstick by which a consumer measures the quality of a product or information (choice of canned soup, candidate, or the effects of global warming).

Unfortunately, the technological revolution of the 333mhz processor and its promise of "nearly instant on" computing that would render all current computers obsolete and all future computers redundant--also, tragically, ushered in the neon-midi age of colour and sound, and "the talkie sitez era" was born.

This, like every excess of the past, led to erosion of accepted standards of aesthetic values and practices. The blinking green tweed background contrasting the fuschia serif face led to an epidemic of suicide (real or imagined is still widely debated and source of wide rifts in academic circles). The camps divided neatly into the neo-blink/counter and post-alpha (transparency) camps. Their bitter dispute was as inane as so many of those backgrounds. There is a third but often excluded group that hopes to widen the scope of the debate: "And what of the green and orange monitors? Are we supposed to discard/dismiss them? Tweed and serif, when viewed on a monochromatic display, have simply no relation to the inherent hermeneutic issues of the VGA argument." [Yes, yes.]

'99 was turbulent year of media riots, pitting the establishment status quo of static white-on-black copy against various combinations of voice, motion picture and white-on-black copy erupting in spontaneous counter culture flashes around the world. Interactivity (the interaction of human and web page) was still almost binary, defined exclusively as "back", "next", and "porn" (though the order is still debated). The inherent limitations of this age were less technological and more demographic in nature.

The democratization of the Internet added "IM" and "soft" to the vernacular. Shopping (e-commerce) was but a year and 128bit encryption away.

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