The Whole Web!

Working at a prep school had its advantages and disadvantages. 

I started in 1983 at a salary of 11K per year. Less than $1000/mo! Granted that included a rent free house and free food at the dining hall if you wanted. Even being frugal, there wasn’t a lot of extra, especially as a family of four. And yearly raises were about $1,000 a year so that by 1990 I was just reaching 20K. Not a lot for car payments or insurance or savings.

Many of my colleagues came from family money and had vacation homes on the Cape or Nantucket or the Jersey shore and vacationed over Spring break in Vale or in Europe. We did not. During holidays and the summer the dining hall was closed and we were on our own, and it was a bit bleak. A bit like the new movie The Holdovers.

But there were amazing benefits. We had our own hockey rink, swimming pool, racquetball courts, basketball courts, gymnasium, track and weight room so it was easy to play faculty sports. Of course we had an incredible library and as an astronomy teacher I had MY OWN PLANETARIUM! I also curated a world class mineral collection called the Barnes collection.

The best part, however, was that every 7 years or so a faculty member was eligible for a sabbatical year. This is unheard of today. Two faculty members were given FULL salary for a year with no questions asked and total freedom to do whatever they wanted. The hope was that one would further one’s education or experience to better one’s career, but it was not regulated.

In the middle of all this change, in 1993, I was awarded one of the two sabbatical years. Because my then wife was the head of one of the dorms, we elected to not move out permanently but to simply travel from that base.

I decided to use the year to learn what other schools were doing with technology to help with our strategic planning. I attended both local conferences as well as visited local schools. I drove to a conference in Des Moines Iowa, and I headed out for a long journey on the west coast. 

I drove from my parent’s home in LA up the coast and visited several schools in San Francisco. I was graciously received everywhere. Then it was on to Portland and Oregon Episcopal. Amazingly, they had an entire lab filled with PDP11s, a type of mini computer basically beyond their time. It was a holdover from an early donor. It was interesting how schools had filled their labs with whatever they were given. I remembered my visit to the principal a couple of years earlier where I was lectured about my choices by a group of insurance industry parents.

Next I headed up the coast to Seattle. I had an invite from Andy at Lakeside Academy, the computer coordinator at the time. Through the years I would work a lot with Lakeside but this was my first visit.

Andy had a small Mac lab near his office but was a bit apologetic. The school is the alma mater of Bill Gates and Paul Allen and they had founded Microsoft and had donated the new science center. They used PCs almost everywhere. Using Macs or even saying the word was risky. At that time, however, PCs were still using DOS as an operating system.

I got a tour of the administrative technology and they showed me a PDP11 that they were using for the school schedule. It was quite antiquated and troublesome but Bill Gates had written the program when he was a student there and they did not dare replace it. I showed them some of the FileMaker databases I was now selling to schools but they just said they could never get permission to use Macs at the school. 

That evening Andy and I were in his office. He told me about this new Mac program called Netscape Navigator. He said that you could use it to access the “world wide web”! As far as I could tell I had never heard that term before. I was curious. He told me that a fellow at some university had compiled a list of all the sites – 83 of them! He showed me the list. What you had to do, it said, was “point your browser at” and then type in this curious address that started with “www”.

So for the next couple of hours, Andy and I surfed the ENTIRE web, visiting each and every site. At that time most of the sites consisted of a page of text that mostly said “Welcome. Here is our Site. Here is our phone number.”

There were sites where the letters flashed and some moved like a marquee or there were different flashing colors. It was not a lot of useful information but these sites were the start of the World Wide Web.  

By 1994 there were 2,700 and in 1995 23,500. The university guy did try to keep his list of all sites accurate for a couple of years. Then the number went 100,000 and then 500,00 and then a million and then 200 million.

I went back to Loomis and created a tiny website early in 1994. Again, just a page of text. Over the next couple of years we redesigned it as we got pictures and graphics and buttons etc and eventually I was no longer the webmaster. They were just inventing the labels at that time and we missed getting .edu by weeks. So we were “loomis.org” for a long time. The earliest I can find on the WayBack Machine is 1998 but that was the 4th or 5th iteration.

Things are different now but at least I can claim that Andy and I once surfed the ENTIRE WEB!