The history of the Shadowrun Archive

by The Collector

The Shadowrun Archive started in late 1994, just after Mark Imbriaco and Aaron Wigley web sites. I created it as a test project for improving my very weak HTML skills. In order to do so, I already had converted the John Maniha Timeline into HTML for Mark’s site, then I decided to use the web resources of the Astronomical Observatory and started to go around newsgroups, mailing lists and web sites (very few, at the time) downloading everything that could be used for my personal consumption. Yep, the Archive started as a private reference tool, and it grew public after someone told me he could use those files…

Gray

May 1995

I hardly remember the first versions... I know that they were gray, Netscape was not yet out and I had to use Mosaic on an HP/UX workstation. Then Netscape came out with their beta v0.9. Everything changed overnight. Background colors, images aligned almost correctly, wow! I have a screenshot of what the Archive was in May 1995. Anyways, the Archive remained mostly gray during its permanence on the Observatory web server, where I had very little control on which features implement or not. It was all HTML, hand mantained...

Black

1996/1997

Then, in 1996, the Archive changed home. It moved to www.interware.it/shadowrun, where it stayed until the summer of 1998. Almost immediately the background changed to black, to reflect the hipness and high cool factor of owning my first web server (yeah, whatever). This version was so cool that I don't have a copy of it... just some images that I arranged in a mockup of the main page. Without text. Oh well, better than nothing...

Miscellaneous

1996/1998

And now, let's go to the mandatory Miscellaneous section. There's always one, right? Anyways, the Archive had several cosmetic changes between 1996 and 1998, all of them lost. I have just some graphics, arranged in this collage-page. It sure strikes some memory, but damned if I remember the rest of the layout :)

Frames

Oh boy, that was shortlived! I received literally tons of hate mail, and I had to restore the old version. Never again, I swear. Frames are a creation of the devil… No screenshot for this poor puppy.

White

July 1998

I liked this version a lot, but it seems no one else did. In any case, it was the interface of the Archive for some months, and the redirection page for my old web server (http://www.interware.it/shadowrun/) still shows that influence. On March 25th, 1998, I wrote... "...here there are 1,186 files (html, asp and what else) for a full total of 76,1 Mbytes of disk space. Six regular (yeah, right) columns. Web applications and features like the Timeline Explorer and the VR2 Host Generator. Since December 1997 we've had more than 123,000 hits on the home page, and, as of today, we're around 1020 hits a day..." Then it comes the time when bandwidth and disk space become suddenly important to my associate and so the Archive slowly started to find a new home. As in the Millenium snake, the head meets the tail in a perfect circle, so I ended up at the beginning. Mark Imbriaco was there again to offer the Archive a home :) But this took months, and the job was not really done until I moved to Victoria, BC.

Black again, but offline

October 1998

I clearly remember working on this page in an hotel room in Madrid, at the end of 1998 summer. Madrid is a nice city, the people there are friendly and the nightlife is quite interesting. Nevermind the fact that I was in a dusty hotel room coding the new version of the Archive... :) This was one of the many experiments done during the hiatus of the site and it didn't see the light of the day, except for some members of Deep Resonance who promptly gave me their helpful opinions ("IT SUCKS!")

Online again

December 1998

I know, this screenshot was taken on May 2nd, 1999, but the Archive didn't really changed since its rebirth on http://shadowrun.html.com/... The big changes, moving from Interware to S.H.C, were mainly in the backend coding, going from an ASP solution to PHP3. Everything else is purely cosmetic :)

Bad TV

December 1999

During the course of 1999, several little changes occoured on the Archive, but nothing real earthshattering. The main difference was a background image that gives an impression of a bad TV working. Lots of people hated it :) But it looked cool and technical, so I left it ther. Besides, the Shadowrun Archive Forum at Deep Resonance had the same theme, so... Another interesting thing was the inclusion of a featured book directly from the main page. Makes it for a more... random start :)

Tomorrow

This is the situation as of today, January 4th, 2000, but I’m pretty sure that the Archive will continue to evolve. We have some neat things in the oven and the results should be visible in the next months…

Speaking of oven, I have to cook now. Pasta. (of course, I’m still Italian)