In 1989--93, I had a computer I named Monster, because it always needed repairs, and it fought back when you tried to repair it. My very first computer, however, was a Commodore VIC-20, with 20 characters per line, 25 lines per screen, and 4k of avaiilable user memory. Monster was extremely advanced compared to the Vic, or even to the 64 which followed it. It was a 486, a nauseating mass of cables and cards inside, and you had to take out lots of stuff to get at whatever needed the repair. Its screws maliciously got lost during repairs. I also used a computer which was nameless, an 800x600 256-color Mac 6100 Laptop that my boyfriend stole when he moved out. I think stuff I reference here was done mainly on it, perhaps, but we did not have a personal relationship. Better to introduce you to Monster....

My first web pages were very simple.

Like this one.

I hand-coded them. I knew about nested tables for layout, but couldn't keep track of all the tags by hand.

My site was a multimedia (sic) version of Baudelaire poems with my own translations. Only fragments of it remain, that were copied onto other people's sites and that I later found by Googling myself.

I thought it was safe to keep your web files just on the web server and not even store them locally! And I was composing them using the "advanced" (i.e. plain HTML) editor in Geocities. Then Geocities got bought by Yahoo, and my whole "neighborhood," Athens, (for literature and philosophy) was eliminated with no warning. Academic types just weren't the kind of eyeballs you could sell to advertisers.

I lost my fledgeling site and never went near the web until a second launch of my web site several year later using Microsoft Publisher in which I advertised each of my poems with a piece of clip art. This was much more tasteless that my first site.

Next I got Dreamweaver and started making my own site designs. My first site had a nav bar with (I thought) clever visual puns, like a picture of Edgar Allen Poe for "Poetry" but it was a lousy site. But that was recent history (alas...) Monster was already a thing of the past. Soon I would be making the first version of my "real" site, www.sporkworld.org and interacting with real web artists and forgetting my early, bad attempts at web work which I have stashed in my ATTIC. Now Sporkworld needs redesign, too, but that's another matter. Soon it will end up in my Attic.. . I am in the middle of some new work which will compliment what's already on Sporkworld by being quite different (it's based on extensive photography and a study of the aesthetics of kitsch).

-- Millie Niss
    men2@columbia.edu

P.S. My first computer (not web-- it wasn't popular then) art work worthy of the name was definitely written on Monster but it has disappeared into that machine's final, fatal hard disk crash. I'm sorry because the piece would be strangely relevant now. It was a Scheme-based simulation of a press conferences with President Bush (the First) about Iraq, which he was about to invade. You asked questions and Bush answered, full of Bushisms. He sort of answered your question, but hedged (especially when the program couldn't parse the question!). He'd call on different journalists at the press conference by saying "You in the yellow shirt and mauve feathered hat" or whatever. It was a fun program to write. And it made the point that Bush and his war were programmed and unthinking. The fact that it was an unsophisticated program made the point more strongly yet....