Mike Brudenell: 30 years of the University website

To celebrate 30 years of the University of York website launching, we caught up with Mike to learn about how this discovery helped the department to create our first ever website 'Yorkweb' back in September 1994. 

Who first decided we needed a website?

That’s the wrong question, framed very much in terms of today’s very structured, process-oriented, decision-making world! The reality was very different back then…

I joined the Computing Service (as IT Services was then known) in July 1988. Shortly afterwards, the Director of the Computing Service, Dr Mike Jinks, started setting aside a small pot of money each year known as the Innovation Scheme. Computing Service staff were able to put forward bids for small projects to the fund, and those deemed worthy were funded.

One such project put forward by the then Head of Systems, Dave Atkin, was for an Information Server. This new service would be provided using software he wrote himself, running on a MicroVAX computer bought with funding from the Innovation Scheme. The aim was to be able to provide much of our existing documentation online: making it easily accessible 24/7, faster to update, and reducing the need for us to print paper booklets of documentation. The bid was passed and the University’s Information Server went live in summer 1989.

Besides ourselves in the Computing Service, the two big information providers we got on board were the Library and the Department of Archaeology, the latter using it to provide reading lists and other course information to their students. Julian Richards of Archaeology was a key driver behind their adoption of the service, and his enthusiasm encouraged other departments to investigate and start using it too. Read our interview with Julian Richards. 

The Information Server software was very basic, designed to work on dumb terminals which were the norm at the time. As such, information was displayed as plain text on 80x24 character terminal screens. Each screenful was either a menu or textual content, with the latter possibly split over more than one page to read through. Menus were navigated not with a mouse but by typing in the number of a menu item. There were no images, sounds, video clips, just text.

In 1991 we bought our first Unix mainframe computers (long-term members of the University might remember them being named “tower” and “castle”) and started working out how to provide services on them. We could see we’d likely slowly move away from using VAX/VMS to Unix and needed to make sure services, including the now very popular Information Server, were available on it.

Whilst reading news articles from various mailing lists I learned about some new software and communications protocol called “Gopher”, created by the University of Minnesota. The software worked very much like our Information Server, presenting screens that were either menus or a series of pages of textual content. But it also benefited from two extra features:

• a menu item could lead not just to a page of text, but also invoke a ‘helper’ application to show an image or play a sound
• the software used a very simple protocol to retrieve the menus and pages of information to display from software running on a computer elsewhere, that computer might be on-site or elsewhere in the world.

As the Gopher software was designed for Unix and worked so like our Information Server, I thought it worth showing to Dave Atkin. He agreed and, within a short space of time, had adapted his Information Server software to ‘talk’ Gopher protocol. We could then use the Gopher software on Unix to access our Information Server!

But as we gradually learned about Unix and prepared to launch a user service on it, I stumbled across another interesting news article: this time for something called the “Worldwide Web.” Like Gopher, it used software to view information and a protocol (HTTP) to retrieve it from a “web server.” Also like Gopher, web servers could be anywhere in the world.

However, unlike Gopher, it offered a richer medium for conveying information:

• instead of screens that were either a menu or textual content, it showed pages of content with “hot text” that could be selected/clicked on to move onward to another page;
• pictures could be embedded within a page instead of having to be displayed separately as a menu item.

This seemed… interesting! Even more so as the web browser viewing software wasn’t just able to retrieve information from web servers, but also Gopher servers, and FTP (file transfer) servers.

I installed up a web browser and showed it to Dave, who immediately saw its potential. We agreed to use web browser software “mosaic” for the few graphical X11 terminals we had, and “lynx” for our text-based dumb terminals, to retrieve the content from our now Gopher-enabled Information Server.

But, crucially, Dave also told me to investigate setting up a web server to see what it was like to manage.

Yorkweb

Over the next year or two we moved more and more to our Unix service and, behind the scenes, learned about writing web pages: creating them using text editors to manually type in the markup language (HTML) to format test pages.

I worked on setting up the new web server software, learning how to download its code and compile, install and configure it. Dave worked on writing conversion software that could read in the now many thousands of pages on the Information Server and output them as HTML files, we could tell that Gopher would be a dead-end, superseded by this new-fangled web-thing!

It was a very small team of us working on the project, I handled the web server software side of things; Dave Atkin converting Information Server content to be ready for the web; our Information Officer, Anne Worden, keeping an eye on things to make sure content was there and people knew what would be happening; John Byrne managing coordination with departments; Julian Richards of Archaeology as one of the key departments providing content.

In the summer of 1994 we were ready… We had a stable web server running. Dave triggered his script, and some time later copies of all the Information Server files were produced for it. We tested it, updating its content until, eventually, we were happy.

And at midday on 19th September 1994 we hit the big button to launch our web service, then named YorkWeb, to the University … and the world! (It was minuted in our System Group records simply as “YorkWeb Day happened.”!)

Tell us about Radio York wanting to cover the launch.

As far as I remember, Radio York didn’t approach us but we approached them, letting them know that the University was planning on joining in with this strange, new Worldwide Web. They decided it sounded like a story to cover and said they’d send a radio car to the University for the 12 noon launch.

This was held in D/104, the SGI Indigo workstation classroom, the one room we had with a significant number of devices capable of displaying the new website in all its glory. We set up each of the workstations with the web browser open and ready to load the website, and waited for the Radio York radio car and noon…

And waited…
And waited…

At 11:55am we were all getting twitchy, debating whether to proceed without Radio York there. Then, suddenly, the radio car pulled up outside! A figure hurtled in with a microphone dragging an extremely long cable behind it, and ran up the stairs to the first floor where we were. 

The link back to Radio York HQ was established and, at around 11:58am John Byrne was interviewed about what was about to happen. There’s a picture of this around too; when I see it I always think of that slightly out-of-breath presenter!

Then at noon our colleague back in the Computing Service building flicked the metaphorical switch to start the web server, we clicked the “load” button and lo! the first ever grey-backed home page of the University’s website appeared.

YorkWeb was born!

What was the purpose of the website? What could you do?

As you can see, setting up YorkWeb wasn’t a one-off decision with a “purpose” in mind. Instead it was a series of evolutionary decisions and some serendipity, happening to stumble across two exciting new protocols, Gopher then the Web, very early on. I think York was likely one of the very first UK universities to have its own web service, especially a service filled with so much content courtesy of our years with the in-house developed Information Server.

That early YorkWeb service was initially focused on delivering the content the Information Server had, reading lists for students, news about what was going on in departments, updates from the Library.

How does the current website compare?

The early YorkWeb site was basic in the extreme! On graphical devices, such as on the growing base of PCs, every web page had a uniform mid-grey background, with the same single font/typeface.

Because its initial content had been derived from the Information Server it retained much of the menu/content page structure, even though the Web was capable of so much more. Only a handful of top-level pages were laboriously re-created to make use of that.

But, gradually, as people became more used to creating content for it. enthusiasm grew. This was helped by the arrival of dedicated web page authoring editors (we offered ECSedit) that let you use pointy-clicky formatting which, underneath, produced the HTML files the web server needed.

Nowadays the University uses a Content Management System (CMS) to do the same sort of thing, but with loads of extra features such as scheduling pages, removing them, making links consistent and so on.

The design of websites has changed so much over the years too. At the beginning, when individual sites had relatively little content, the habit was to liberally sprinkle each page with links onward to other “interesting” sites. Gradually that pioneering “go off and explore” mentality changed to efforts to keep people on a website instead of herding them off. 

Back then we didn’t have the faintest idea that the Web would become so pervasive and capable as the years went by. Originally designed to deliver text, images and sound it now provides video streaming, ticket booking, database searching, shopping, live streaming, and so much more!

It’s a great feeling to have been involved with its use and growth at the University, from pretty much the start of the Worldwide Web’s existence!