In the mid-1990's we decided that Prodigy, CompuServe, and/or AOL were not for us and signed up instead for a soon-to-be-famous dial-up ISP called ClarkNet. This account gave us unprecedented access to the fledgling Internet plus a Unix shell account and an email address.
One weekend in early Spring 1996 we attended a cookout at Tim and Beth Singleton's and the topic turned to the World Wide Web. I said I thought that maybe my ClarkNet account might let me have my own web page which seemed fantastical to everyone there. Once home I immediately taught myself enough HTML to create a page (using vi in the shell account). It contained a picture that Melanie had drawn of Tim and Beth's son Dylan and a few other things we wanted to share. I managed to copy all the files to the right folder and set the protections correctly and, whoa, it all worked! Then I sent a smug email to as many people who were at the cookout that I could find email addresses for with a link to the page.
Beth Singleton is the daughter of a renowned Columbia personality, Bob Moon, whose brother, Bill, wrote a monthly family newsletter which he printed, copied, folded, and first-class mailed to the extended family (because it was the 90's). In one of these newsletters, the Johnson Family Album got its first (and as-yet only) review:
Just as we were early adopters with ClarkNet, we dumped dial-up and jumped onto a cable modem as soon as it was offered (even before the term "broadband" was coined) and ported the Johnson Family Album to what was called Comcast@Home.
In porting the album over we tried to achieve the look and feel of an actual scrapbook-style album using covers, page-turns, and backgrounds to maintain the illusion. Once created in the late 1990's, this version of JFA grew slowly but steadily over the next decade until about 2008. Along the way, we picked up our own domain, jfjohnson.net, and made use of a lot of different online albums and services. Then the JFA remained largely unchanged and began degrading as links broke and online photo galleries bit the dust.
Meanwhile, as the JFA was sitting idle, we were not! We maintained online albums, music libraries, streaming video; we set up MySpace and Facebook and Google+ pages; we published extended family calendars and address lists and a genealogy web site; we did eBay, Twitter, and blogs, oh my! Here is a sampling from that era:
| Melanie's Meal-credit Calculator | ...was written up in the Brown University newspaper |
| Margo's Electronic Career Portfolio | ...became an oft-cited example in FBLA's program |
| judy's Flickr | ...showcases some of her charity & political work |
| John wrote Windows Phone apps | ...a Windows 8.1 Store app, too; mirrored here |
| John reverse-engineers the NYT Crossword puzzle | ...via XSLT; but we do not approve of pirating ;-) |
| Margo's YouTube has over 16,384 views | ...John's has 256 views |
| We have 65,536 digital photos in the cloud | ...here are about 1% of them in a slide-show |
| Likewise, we have thousands of videos | ...here is Mel on the Mall and here is Snow-blind |
| Melanie got a planetary high score | ... in Wordament; we also like Sporkle |
| John's on eBay, Margo's on Twitter , Mel's on Facebook | ...in fact, we're all on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/etc. |
| Our home is on Zillow (if you know our address) | ...and here are some remodeling pictures |
We have come a long way from the original ClarkNet site (see screen capture below) but we only look back for a minute while we forge ahead.