I was one of the first web developors in Philadelphia, so this article was a trip down memory lane. Before Internet Explorer, it was pretty much Netscape, Mozilla and the hated AOL browser. The latter couldn't even display tables—and the client nearly always used the damn AOL browser.

When Internet Explorer came out and pretty much killed Netscape, I was pretty unhappy as were my fellow developers.

I started hand coding, and searched for new and better tools all the time. An employee at the web dev company I co-founded located something called Future Splash Creator—which I immediately saw was useful and important we began using. It was acquired by Macromedia and re-named Flash.

I was deeply involved in the first decade when the web emerged. And I'm back at it again. But the crazy free wild west of the early days are gone forever. For better or worse.