One of the things we created when we moved into our new location was a little “nook” with a comfortable chair and a book case for holding reading material. It also gives a place for members of the team to get a change of scenery. It does my heart good to walk through the office and find someone utilizing this little escape area.
That book case also contains some relics from the early days of Worthwhile. I guess you could call it our museum. Looking back on our history, I wish we would have kept a “virtual” museum — copies of software and websites we have created. Looking back always makes you appreciate where you are!
Well, I recently happened across a very important relic of our past. It was the website that brought Dan Wooster and myself together a decade ago. I found mirrored on a website in Ukraine the original HTML of the site. I had Jared suck it down and we now have it archived on our site.
I still remember sitting at a computer in my office located in the basement of Bob Jones University. I was taking the book of I John from the Bible (one of the shortest) and linking each word to the lexicon meaning of the word. I ran into a problem with the verbs because I couldn’t “double-link” to the parsing. I solved that problem by inserting an * after each verb and linking to the parsing.
Of course, you can imagine how time intensive this was. Imagine doing the whole Bible! I had only gotten through a few verses when I realized that this was going to be impossible.
That is when Dan Wooster walked in. He heard that I had been tasked to bring the BJU website online and he had great interest in that. He came by to offer his help. When he stopped by, he saw what I was doing and I’m sure he laughed inside! “You don’t need to be doing that!” he said. “I can have a student write a program that will do that for you.”
It was Robert Martincic who ended up writing the code to make the project a reality. He is now employed by the university and continues to help make things easier for the people ministering there. It would be cool to find the program that actually made the conversion.
Needless to say, I realized at that point that there were greater possibilities with the Internet than just web pages. I might have some interesting ideas and some basic HTML design knowledge, but the “future” of the web was going to be a lot more than just cute graphics with hyperlinks.
I grin now when I see the design. Those little red dot buttons were all the rage back in the day. I would say I am embarrassed by it, but really at that time this was about like most everything else out there. Now, we’ll just keep it in the virtual museum.
Like I said, “Looking back always makes you appreciate where you are!”
