It was sometime around 1994 when I gained access to the Internet for the first time. My wife Rhonda and I had a business called VIFX / VIDEO IMAGE. In those days, high speed 24/7 access was rare. Most internet access was by 28k dialup and some isdn (128k).At the company, we used email extensively. When we wanted to write email to someone outside of the company, it took a while. There was a single computer that held all outgoing email and periodically contacted a service provider and exchanged all of the company email over dialup.
Later, we installed an isdn line. This line was twice as fast as dialup, usually about 128 kbps, but was similar to dialup in that it was not a full time connection. When someone on the system wanted to access the Internet, the isdn modem would automatically dial out to our service provider.
Incoming connections were similar. Our company web site was hosted on a PC sitting in the engineering office. If someone tried to access our web site, our service provider's isdn modem would call our isdn modem and a connection was established.
We had a small web site for our company on a PC that ran an APACHE server and that is how things worked for a couple of years. As this system had limited bandwidth, we could not allow all of our employees Internet access for surfing and email was exchanged in scheduled sessions.
By 1996, and about the time we sold the company and I resigned my position at VIFX / VIDEO IMAGE we had a full time T-1.
I was intrigued by the whole concept of a place to store ideas and facts that was instantly accessible from anywhere in the world. It wasn't long before I started my own web page "gregssandbox.com". It was my "sandbox" the place I could tell the stories I enjoyed telling my friends. A place I could document ideas and facts that I thought were interesting.
Sometime about 1997, I moved "gregssandbox.com" to a commercial server. This commercial server had all sorts of advantages. I could store "unlimited" (so they said at the time) data and they would give me "unlimited" email accounts. At the time, all I wanted was one: greg@gregssandbox.com . I had my own domain and my own email address.
My friend Greg "Koz" Kozikowski, was my first mentor to web creation. He knew a little about writing HTML with a simple text editor. Somehow, I discovered that Netscape (I think it was version 3.XX at that time) had a wonderful WYSIWYG editor. It made it easy to create pages with links, images and text. There was even a spell checker. Today, 2006, I still prefer the Netscape HTML editor. I use version 4.7, which is pretty old, but it creates simple HTML that is not too full of all sorts of "wordy" code. Even though Netscape is up to version 7.X , I still prefer v4.7. The only drawback of this old version is when you get too much text, it gets REALLY SLOW. Too much, in this example would be like 20 pages. A couple of pages works just fine.
Greg's Sandbox has had many iterations over the years. I am re-structuring it now in its 10th year. Much stuff is the same as when I first wrote the pages and there is allot of new stuff.
Some of my favorite pages are:
In any event, these pages are just for fun. I hope you enjoy what you find.Greg
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