Colours: Neutral Weird Reload


Anecdotical notes about the play list

25–

I created this play list in a rather early stage of my website activities. It was around August 1997, before my first experiments with CGI (January 1999) and before I had my own domain (December 2000). My provider was then still knoware.nl, which was later renamed to Ision and now seems to be part of Easynet.

In those days, in my pages I hardly used hyperlinks that pointed to menus. Instead, I tried to keep a menu in sight all the time, using frames. That is a method that I am now getting to like less and less.

The play list's colours (you can switch them off here), bright green text on a dark green background, were inspired by the program Norton Edit (ne.com). You could toggle between different colour schemes using F5. Then and still now, I found/find bright green on black an attractive, inspiring and warm combination, so I often used this combination.

If memory serves I used Norton Edit to enter parts of my unfinished book in computer files. Ne.com had the advantage that it could handle long lines of text, i.e. paragraphs. However, when trying again now, I find it doesn't show the whole of a paragraph on the screen. In those days, other text editors had a limited line length, or there was some other reason why I didn't like to work with them.

Norton Edit would let you handle two files at the same time, by dividing the screen into two windows with a horizontal bar. But there was a bug in that feature: when opening the same text file twice, in the two windows, and saving one of them to disk, the whole file was lost.

For some time I also used the text editor that came with LapLink (a program to transfer files from one computer to another; networks weren't common yet back then). Later, I also used Windows 3.10 program Write, and even Word, which can be used as a text editor, with line wrapping of long paragraphs, but without an option to disable that feature.

Later still, when I had discovered HTML, line length was immaterial for paragraph length, because – just like nroff that I had used earlier – it had clear formatting commands, including commands for delimiting paragraphs and for bulleted lists. Since then I use text editors by Borland, which are part of programming systems for C or Turbo Pascal – now in the museum, but then very powerful and fast, even on those days’ very modest hardware.

But I digress. So let’s get back to the play list. It was intended to list some great pieces of music, that had impressed me over the years. But it was also an experiment with hyperlinks: between and inside files. I learnt the meaning of www, world wide web, it was literally a web of hyperlinks, to information anywhere in the world, but where appropriate also within a single document or between documents very close to each other.

So I tried to summarise info in one document and work out the details in another – hyperlinking back to the point where the list referred to the details.

To the next part