14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s official company website is celebrating its 20th anniversary and, to honor this important event, the software giant decided to bring the original design back online.
As you can see for yourself by clicking on this link or by zooming in the photo on the right, the website was more or less just a collection of links mixed with a few lines of text and Microsoft’s own logo at the center of everything.
The company itself admits that, at that time, the notion of web design wasn’t really advanced, so the version you’re seeing here is pretty much the best a company could get out the technologies available in 1994.
“In 1994, among the reasons Microsoft started a website was to put its growing Knowledge Base online. At the time, the company managed support forums for customers on CompuServe, one of the earliest major Internet dial-up service providers,” the company says.
Mark Ingalls, a Microsoft engineer in 1994 who would become Microsoft.com’s first administrator, explains that 20 years ago he was the only employee in charge of taking care of the website and it’s easy to see why. Modifications included small text adjustments and new links that were published or removed every once in a while.
What’s more interesting is that the information posted on this website was delivered to Ingalls on floppy disks, and the reason is as simple as it could be. At that time, optical discs were still a thing of the future, and the amount of text that needed to be published on the website could easily be copied on a floppy disk.
“Steve Heaney and I put together PERL scripts that handled a lot of these daily publishing duties for us,” Ingalls says. “For a while, we ran the site like a newspaper, where we published content twice a day. And if you missed the cutoff for the publishing deadline, you didn’t get it published until the next running of the presses, or however you want to term it.”
At this point, a team of 30 members are taking care of Microsoft’s website, with Chris Balt currently holding the Microsoft.com product manager role.
“My job exists to serve the user and to serve our customers – so first and foremost, the job of the home page is telling people what Microsoft is about; it’s helping them accomplish a task. That could mean fixing a problem. That could be learning about new products. Or that could be learning about old products,” Balt explains.
If you’re wondering, the 1994 Microsoft.com webpage was based on a similar modern and responsive design as today’s version, as it was created to automatically adapt to any device that loads it and render it appropriately.