Ancient Web: Phil’s Old Radios Explained How He Built a Website in 1995

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

When Philip I. Nelson launched a website about antique radios in 1995, the camera was a Nikon loaded with film, the computer ran at 90 MHz, and digitizing a photograph meant borrowing a scanner after work.

Read How I Built This Website.

Phil's Old Radios is already the subject of an Ancient Web article for its enormous collection of restoration projects. This particular page deserves a separate look because Nelson explains the work of making the website itself. His earliest photographic studio was a corner of his children's playroom: a radio on top of their puppet theater, household lamps around it, and a tripod in front.

The film was developed as prints, then scanned using a flatbed machine in his workplace library after hours. Nelson adjusted the resulting pictures in image-editing software and eventually replaced this process with digital cameras. He explains why backgrounds, lamp placement, color balance, and image compression were not glamorous details but essential parts of getting old equipment to look right online.

A website built one file at a time

Nelson recalls beginning his web work in 1994 with text editors such as DOS Edit and Windows Notepad. He experimented with visual editors in subsequent years, but kept using Notepad for ordinary changes. Microsoft Word's HTML exporter produced too much extraneous markup for his taste, although he used its spelling and grammar checks.

Another wonderfully period-specific problem was case sensitivity. A page tested on Windows might happily load image.JPG through a link to Image.jpg. Move the same files to a Unix server and the picture disappears. His preference for a flat directory of HTML files and a single art directory also made sitewide changes easier.

The site's gallery reflects his philosophy: small thumbnails lead to larger photos, and navigation tells visitors which section they have entered. Nelson contrasts the days when people found new websites by following links with the later habit of arriving directly from search engines. He says his retired home-page counter reached more than one million hits, while noting that it missed visits landing elsewhere.

Those audience figures are his own account, not independently verified analytics. What survives beyond dispute is a detailed firsthand explanation of early web publishing, complete with the mistakes and workarounds.

Read Nelson's full account.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.