In the late 1980's I was administering a Unix box called plasmoid at Dartmouth College. The Web did not exist back then but I was happy to have a machine on the Internet.
Sometime before 1997-04-07, whilst working for TARRC, I set up their Elastomers in Engineering website using an account at Demon Internet. Later I cheekily created a subdirectory to host my own website and it persisted even after I left in early 1999 to start a new job at the University of Hertfordshire. Once I had sorted out a new website for myself I went back to visit TARRC and deleted the subdirectory. There is a record of this original site at the Internet Archive (1999-11-27 to 2000-08-16).
At UH I ran a webserver from a Sun box on my desk using Apache until 2001-10-11 and publicfile thereafter. Eventually I realised just how silly it was to host my website at work and (after making alternative arrangements) shut the server down. It had been a useful learning process though, and again my site was captured for posterity at the Internet Archive (2001-03-02 to 2002-11-29).
Meanwhile, on 2000-02-22 I had registered the domain name irishpaul.com for a friend. I used Network Solutions but found dealing with them terribly frustrating as their customer support was effectively non-existent.
Eventually, on 2002-11-07 I registered zenatode.org.uk and zenatode.org to use for myself. I was much better informed by then and registered the domains using Black Cat Networks where I also got a shell account. They got my irishpaul.com domain out of the hands of Network Solutions on 2002-11-24.
On 2004-04-07 I was accepted as an Open Directory Project category editor.
After nearly six years working at UH I finally said goodbye on 2005-02-18 and switched to running everything through Black Cat Networks. Despite having over two years to move stuff across I still had a hectic last week at work trying to untangle the remaining connections.
In July 2007 Black Cat Networks closed down and transferred customers to other providers. My ADSL connection moved to Nitrex and my hosted services moved to Mythic Beasts.
In October 2008 I finally got round to getting a faster Internet connection. At that point I was still on a 512 k connection with Nitrex and although they offered to put me up to 8 meg I decided to migrate to Be Unlimited, which was a bit cheaper and offered a maximum theoretical download speed of 24 meg. In fact I am getting about 13 meg, but that is still a huge step up.
www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/ Ian Gregory 2009