What were they created with?

I used to use a lot of patience to build these pages, but now I have decent Mac. And WordPress. However I still use much of the same software as I did in the beginning:

• BBEdit: the market-leading text editor on the Mac. The HTML & PHP modes especially make life easy.
• Graphic Convertor is an excellent package for messing with images. Its editing abilities are good, though it’s no Photoshop (I leave that to the experts at work).
• Apple’s own web browser Safari. Unsurisingly, still the best on Mac.

What’s in a name?

Freeserve caused a revolution in the UK when it launched in September 1998 (it later got bought out, and renamed, by the French ISP Wannadoo). It was the first ISP to offer free-of-subscription internet access (you just pay for the call charges). I signed up in the first few days: its national free service was what we’d tried to achieve locally with CamNet (the Cambridge freenet). Well, we’d initially hoped to achieve a whole lot more as a “community internet” but that didn’t really happen. And we were never able to offer full internet access. Hence the arrival of Freeserve (and the similar services that followed it) left CamNet with no future.

When I saw that CamNet was going to die, I took the vain step of registering whiteland.net. That’s currently looked after by Hover.

Freeserve no longer exists: after first switching to broadband with Demon in 2002, I then switched again to Nildram in 2006. Then the lure of really cheap broadband from TalkTalk tempted me, so I switched to them in 2007. Eventually, I realised that I should probably spend a bit more for better service, hence Virgin Media (joining pretty much everyone else in Cambridge city). But, really, why stick with a national company when there are better/faster/cheaper local options available, so I ended up with the lovely folks at Cambridge Fibre at the end of my time in Cambridge. Here in Birmingham we’ve had TalkTalk fibre (which was surprisingly good) and now Vodafone fibre (which isn’t).