TV For fans of web ephemera, here's Toby Anstis explaining to the BBC kids of 1995 how to reach the CBBC website:
Has subdomain redirects not been invented yet or was someone being lazy or is that just my hazy knowledge of how the web works?
Or am I just distracted by this clip of his predecessor Philippa Forester suggestively waving a banana around in front of Terry Nutkins?
Ha - thanks for this. I might just reblog it to my students. Ancient history.
ReplyDeleteI remember the days well - I was designing web sites around this time when people still thought it was a fad.
I remember trying to convince our IT people that a) we don't need to include the http crap on our URL, and that if you put an index.html page in every folder, you could give people shorter URLs. It took a few years for people to see that. Trouble is, techies like to type and that URL is clearly set up by someone used to working in DOS rather than with a GUI. (Setting up "bbc.co.uk/childrens" would have meant putting a directory for the Children's TV dept at the top level of the site structure, but that wouldn't have reflected "reality" - I was still having this conversation a few years ago with companies who thought their site should be modelled on their internal corporate hierarchy - so always start with a photo of the MD and work down from there).
As for the BBC domain name, for a long time bbc.com and bbc.co.uk were owned by an American business. If you went to their site, there was even an exasperated "this is NOT the British Broadcasting Corporation". I think they gave in in the end and sold it to them. Or went out of business.