My department at MSU had a day celebrating 50 years of computing at MSU. So, in the MSU Computer Store, there was a Mac II plugged in and running, tiny monochromatic monitor and all.

I couldn’t help but look, and lo and behold, the hard drive had TeachText and NCSA Mosaic, the first publically available web browser, on it. When I started Mosaic, it had the date on the startup screen: 10-29-1993.

So, I wrote a web page in TeachText, welcoming people to the Computer Store and our 50 years celebration, and then viewed it in Mosaic. And then I annotated it using using the Mac’s audio-recording (which worked great, by the way).

I’m not the nostalgiac type, but it was weird. The very first web page I wrote, ever, I wrote with TeachText, and the first web browser I ever used was Mosaic on a Mac. It really took me back.

Writing markup with TeachText and seeing it render in Mosaic are the seeds of my life as a professional web developer. It seems so very long ago.