I was incredibly lucky and fortunate enough to be able to afford my own 128k ISDN line in 1998. Rochto and I had just moved into a new apartment in Las Colinas, where the Microsoft Dallas satellite campus is located. Our place was at the corner of Macarthur blvd and LBJ freeway, aka 635. It was the first apartment I ever rented that had its own garage.
I’d been thinking about setting up a website for a while. So I went to Network Solutions and reserved, on 9.28.98, Stepto.com.
I quickly set about creating an NT 4.0 server box with IIS to host the site. It was a Pentium 133 with 128 megs of RAM (I splurged). And Microsoft had just bought Frontpage so of course that is what I immediately used as my website software.
I was so excited the day I registered the domain. I wrestled with the ISDN equipment. I wrestled with the drivers to dual bind the two 64k channels into one 128k upload and download channel. I configured DNS by hand with BIND. I mapped static IP’s to my hardware. All that work, all the learning, and now I was ready to author my own HTML and launch my personal site!
And here, here from my own personal archives, is the first version of Stepto.com with the first post, launched on 9.30.98.
I ended up redoing everything by hand in notepad.
We’ve come a long way. Thanks everyone who reads the site and comments, you guys are awesome and I am totally not worthy of the honor of you visiting here.