THIS is what The Schumin Web once looked like? A little shocking, yes, but true. This is how my site looked on March 23, 1996, the day that The Schumin Web, as Ben Schumin’s Home on the Internet, was first launched on AOL. In preparation for the site’s fifth anniversary next month, I made a reproduction from printouts from the day (authentic due to handwritten dates and dot-matrix printing). Since then, the site has definitely grown, all right. The site was a total of four pages back then. The main page, a “News of the Week” page (that lasted about a year and a half until it was finally axed), an “Information About Me” page (that was axed in less six months, and was replaced later with the current “About Me” page), and finally a “Links to other people’s home pages” page, which was the predecessor to the subsidiary World Wide Web Site Index. Further proof to how primitive the site was back then, there were only two pictures on the site. They were both of me, and getting them was hard. I encountered a QuickCam for Mac (back when they were made by Connectix) in middle school, and a black-and-white shot was taken of me for it. Talk about long ago… that’s long ago. The other picture was my school picture from my freshman year in high school. Another very old picture. I had to send that one to work with Dad to get scanned. And it came back as a GIF. No Mavica back then… wow. I also had no Terms of Use back then, nor a privacy statement (note: the reproduction is under both of these documents). I was wild and free back then… Check it out!
