Multimedia without Media

A bit after this, around 1995, we discovered the web. I remember my friend Galdino explaining this new technology he was getting ready to release to the students. It was a way to access the internet in “multimedia,” through hypertext. In other words, it was no longer just text: you could access images, sounds, and videos, all linked together by links. A link was simply a connection between two files or two pieces of information, letting you navigate from one point to another. Today that sounds obvious, but at the time it was revolutionary. The idea of leaving one document and landing on a completely different one, instantly, was new.

Sometime later, Galdino’s work was ready and we finally got to use a browser. The first browser we saw was Mosaic, but soon after came Netscape Navigator, and that’s when some of us discovered the “cheat code” that made little Godzilla appear — the famous Mozilla mascot, as it was called at the time, which eventually became the name of the foundation that today makes the Firefox browser. They also set up a web server with pages for the Computing Department. Users could create their own directory and host their personal pages. You just had to write a few HTML files to publish content for the rest of the internet. It was a radical change. Many students started experimenting and put together their own pages, not always very useful, but great for learning how to deal with that new technology. And it was around this time that one of the greatest aesthetic crimes in web history appeared: the <blink> tag, which made text blink on the screen. Almost everyone used it, without the slightest idea of good design principles. With so many people using the web, the university’s link couldn’t handle the demand. The web might have been multimedia, but we only used text, because images took many minutes to load and nobody had the patience to wait. What I mean is, we’d turn off image loading so pages would display quickly in the browser. If you were going to wait for the images to load, you could leave it downloading and go have a coffee.

Around that time we started a soccer team to play the department championship, the glorious globular squad of Os Pereba. And, being computing students, of course we created the team’s website. It had it all: an anthem, photos, a list of matches, lineups, and even an animation of a team player whiffing the ball that my brother programmed in JavaScript. It was a super informative site, if anyone really needed that much info about the team. It’s worth remembering that, back then, information still circulated through magazines and newspapers. Even with the internet being born and some pages appearing on the web, it was still the magazines that introduced the public to the “interesting” sites that existed on the Brazilian internet. There were no real search engines, just manual lists of links. To our surprise, the Pereba site was listed in Internet World magazine. It was a short piece on sports sites, and in the soccer section there we were, next to Fluminense and other professional teams. Those were our fifteen minutes of fame.

Another novelty from that period was the release of the Java language. I remember well the marketing around the idea of write once, run anywhere, the promise of running the same code on any platform. That sparked endless discussions among the students. When I heard there was going to be a Java launch event in Rio de Janeiro, I bought the ticket, stayed at my uncle’s place, and went to check it out. The event was nice, well produced, full of expectation and promises. From a technical standpoint there wasn’t all that much, but for someone studying computing it was thrilling to see those ideas emerging, even if many of them were never truly fulfilled, even decades later.

An important step in my education was when I started doing undergraduate research at the university. But that story is for a following chapter.