How It Looked Back Then #

Behold: the lost art of the <table>-based layout.

These screenshots show the original Fear and Loathing in Middle England as it appeared back in 1998–1999 — hand-crafted late at night on a beige CRT monitor by a 22-year-old junior software engineer moonlighting as a web designer, armed with Notepad, FTP, and a stack of Wrox manuals with titles like Instant HTML and Instant JavaScript.

I wrote every tag myself. No templates. No build tools. No frameworks. Just raw HTML, inline styles, and a level of patience and indentation discipline that now seems borderline heroic.

This was the web before CSS positioning or div-based layout.
Before broadband.
Before “responsive” meant anything other than being vaguely polite.

The result? A lovingly clunky, unashamedly retro website that renders just fine in Safari to this day. Heck, I remain so proud of it that I’ve put the source on GitHub.

What’s more, those caffeine-fuelled weekends tinkering with font tags and onmouseover handlers weren’t just a way to avoid doing laundry. They were a personal bootcamp in early internet skills and they paved the way for me to eventually escape the world of IBM OS/390 Assembler and Y2K mainframe firefighting at a bank.

From those humble roots grew a lifelong career building modern internet platforms — and even contributing to something truly meaningful: the NHS App, which now helps tens of millions of people across England manage their health and, at a critical moment, helped open up society after the pandemic. I’m immensely proud to have played a part in that.

It all started here: a scrappy little hand-coded website, a modem, and the stubborn idea that publishing your own corner of the web was worth doing.

So here it is: a digital relic from a simpler time, when websites had hit counters, guestbooks, and an unhealthy number of animated GIFs. Scroll down, take a look, and try not to weep at the pixelated fonts.

The homepage. My journal was included in two webrings: the canonical Open Pages webring (where I was journal number 615) and the rebellious upstart Chapter Two (where I was number 188). I was super excited to be toying with CSS in 1998. This passion would not last.

One of my journal entries from 1998. Note the countdown to the year 2000 next to the date. I was working on Y2K compliance for a major UK bank at the time, and was slightly obsessed by the impending millennium. Deadlines don’t come much more immovable.

I changed the theme in December 1998, trying to add colour and a warm Christmassy feel.

I changed the theme again in January 1999. Constant reinvention was how I honed my HTML/JavaScript/CSS skills, though I recall contemporary readers reporting they found the constant changes disorienting.

I had a few weeks break from journalling in February 1999, which concluded with my publishing this odd page. There being no digital cameras around at this time, I closed my eyes and scanned my head in a UMAX Astra 600P flatbed scanner to produce the image in the top right. The printout on the left hand side was created by surreptitiously stealing some tractor feed assembler output from my client site and scanning it at home.

I was so pleased with the assembler printout effect that I continued using it as a background on my site through to the point where I abandoned the journal. By this time I had settled upon Verdana as my font of choice. It would be five years before I started publishing my thoughts online again, on a blog using the .Text platform.