It’s Only When You Look Back

I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen a similar step change. But just as my Poppa said “When it’s happening you don’t notice it. It’s only when you look back you see how much everything has changed.”

Last month, this website passed a pretty big milestone: it’s been online for over 25 years (since Tuesday, May 29th 2001 - a few days after I finished my university finals exams), making it my online home now for my entire professional career. All along, I’ve been creating content and documenting my various projects and interests of the time, which has turned it into something of a personal time capsule. All of which makes this feel like the right moment to stop and look back at the archived history of this site, my online presence and tech trends that have come and gone. This is going to be a bit of a long (and sometimes embarrassing) one, but I think I’ve earned a little indulgence!

Firstly: No, I’m not going to mention AI. That’s a topic for another day. Secondly: I have spent a lot of time putting this article together, digging out the old screenshots and trying to make sure my memories align with the correct events. But bear in mind this is a look back over many decades of personal, website and tech history - so it’s possible my recollections may be a bit off. Friendly corrections welcome!

From Cassettes To The Cloud

When I do stop and think about how much the world has changed, and what we now for take for granted, it really sinks in. I first started writing code about 40 years ago, with my first home computer - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I can remember exactly the first program I typed in, as I still have the manual. To put things into perspective, here’s the juxtaposition of what my first lines of code would have looked like - typed carefully into a squishy rubber keyboard plugged into the family TV - alongside my current 2026 Ruby On Rails dev setup and my latest project:

In my lifetime so far, I’ve gone from an 8-bit 3.5Mhz computer with 48KB memory, to my current laptop (Apple MacBook Pro) that has nearly 400 thousand times the memory and runs millions of times faster. And that’s just my laptop - Looking around my homelab, one of my refurbished systems (an old HP workstation) has 112 threads at 2Ghz and 1TB memory! I’ve gone from a 1,200 baud modem calling BBSes to gigabit fibre internet; from cassette tapes and floppy disks to NVMe drives for storage; and from being the only kid in my street with a computer to genuinely losing count of the number of devices I own that qualify for that term. Phones, personal and work laptops, tablets, old devices sitting in the back of a drawer, “smart” TVs, Raspberry Pis… Not to mention my old retro systems I still have.

A Different Kind Of Soundtrack

Because computers became such an important part of my life (and frankly, something of a refuge as I was growing up), I find that, much as certain songs pin me to a particular moment, a single piece of technology can catapult me instantly back in time. It’s like another kind of soundtrack to my life: I see an Acorn Archimedes RISC OS desktop, and suddenly I’m right back in the school “design & technology” labs - smelling of sawdust and glue guns - at lunchtime, because I understand computers more than I do people. I hear an old chip tune or see an Amiga cracktro, and I’m in the basement of my mum’s house, an awkward teenager staying up way beyond my bedtime writing letters and swapping floppy disks with contacts in the underground demo/cracking scene. I see a late ’90s pimped-out Linux desktop (Enlightenment Blue Steel, anyone?) and I’m sat up in my student digs, trying to work out where I’m going in life, breaking my new Linux install for like the 20th time.

As this site and it’s predecessor have been online since the late 90s, I’ve seen tech trends come and go and have worked on some really fun stuff. Thanks to archive.org and my own snapshots and backups, I’ve managed to go back through the years and build up a timeline of all the different technology eras. It’s kind of a “Website CV” and tour through the technolgies and cultures of the day, starting from my first dabblings in hand-crafted HTML to the modern cloud-native world. It’s brought back a lot of memories as well as some decidedly cringy photos and website design…

But first…

Pre-History

My digital footprints extend even further back: As well as getting me started on my computing journey, my very first computer also established my first pre-internet on-line presence. Fuelled by endless re-watchings of War Games, I’d become aware of the then-burgeoning BBS scene and I eventually saved up and bought this bad boy:

Connected to my 8-bit computer, I got to experience a connection speed of around 0.0012 Megabits/Second in today’s terms! In our modern always-on, always-connected world where we’re tethered to the Internet 24/7, it’s hard to put into words how different the home computing scene was back then. Each computer was it’s own little island, and data transfer was usually carried out by copying tapes (and later floppy disks) and swapping them in the school yard. With a modem, I got to explore the local BBS scene and was the first time I experienced that feeling of being connected to actual real-life people across the void, albeit with identities closely guarded behind cryptic handles. I’ve even found old archives of these BBS systems from back then and a few of my old logins still even work!

My own TNFS Site is one of my recent projects that aims to re-create that magic I felt back then, and it’s been a real blast seeing users logging in and leaving messages on something akin to the BBS sites of old.

I eventually upgraded to an Amiga system - the essential computing system for the discerning 90s teenage hacker. Through the Amiga, I got more involved in the demo scene and made a lot of connections on BBS systems as well as through “mail trading”. Though much of my work from that time has been lost, there are still many archived disk images out there with my handywork, bearing my old scene handle and group affiliations.

I’d started hanging out on bigger, more well-connected boards (many of which still exist today!) although my funds only initially stretched to a 9600-baud modem. I’d heard mention of this mysterious “Internet” thing, and some of the larger boards of the time offered a gateway to access services like FTP and Telnet. Magazines had just started mentioning the Internet and including enticing FTP URLs and some even had a “website” - whatever that was. Problem was, in addition to the phone bills and costs involved in signing up with one of the early ISPs, my Amiga would have had required upgrades beyond my budget and towards the end of the 90s I could see the writing on the wall for the platform.

Although I even now still write and release software for my Amiga, I was heading to university, and had to begrudgingly jump ship to a more industry standard PC platform. I was moving into shared accommodation at the time, and had to leave my modem behind but that didn’t matter - the University had an incredible, proper connection to the Internet with speeds that were measured in (single-digit) actual Megabits/second.

University

At University, I got my first ever email address (which is still burned into my brain), and also got access to the computer labs full of Windows 3.1 machines replete with Trumpet Winsock and Internet Explorer 4.0. It was then I also got started on my Unix/Linux journey as there was a pool of Linux (Running RedHat 4.x and FVWM95) PCs and some Sun Ultra 5s running Solaris 7 that hardly anyone ever used. Much of my early memories of the Internet were therefore experienced through trusty old Netscape Navigator 4 and the CDE desktop.

It was a pretty pivotal moment for the Linux scene - the introduction of the 2.2-series of kernels and distros like RedHat 6.x meant that people were starting to take Linux seriously, although the die-hard Solaris snobs were still saying that “Linux couldn’t scale” and it was a mere toy operating system. I vividly remember during my work placement year sneaking in Linux “through the back door”, setting up Samba servers, Apache webservers with mod_perl, firewalls and other infrastructure running on discarded desktop PCs.

Browser-wise, it was still mainly Netscape or Internet Explorer v4.x. The Mozilla project had started, but the early betas were more-or-less unusable so by the end of my course, I ended up mostly using Konqueror under KDE 2. There was also a big jump in desktop usability at the time, and we also got XFree86 4.x in this period which introduced anti-aliased font rendering and a whole host of other technologies we now take for granted. I remember things like hacking libfreetype with #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER to get proper (patent-infringing) hinting support, and it was just considered “business as usual”. Anyone complaining about Linux font rendering now should take a look at what we had to deal with back then:

I wote a short guide to fixing things up which was archived in 2002, and from the timestamp in the clock, and the window decorations on my desktop I’d say this screenshot was probably a beta of Red Hat 8.0, or one of the later 7.x series before the Fedora project started. I see Konquerer again running in the background in file-browser mode there; Funnily enough, Konqueror ended up being the browser engine that “won” as it begat KHTML which in turn gave us WebKit / Blink.

The Proto-Web

To get around the early web, I’d use Yahoo! Index or AltaVista to find things, and signed up to a lot of mailing lists. Most of them have long-since disappeared from the Internet and I can’t find any usable archives but I remember frequenting “sunmanagers” and other lists where I learned early netiquette such as the cardinal sin of top-posting. The big “geek” websites I remember having accounts on from around that time were Slashdot (Hot Grits! Oog the caveman! Beowulf clusters! The hidden TrollTalk SID!), the early iterations of OSnews (still going, and has an extensive archive going back to the glory days of alternative OSes), and Kuro5hin.org which has sadly long since vanished.

For software, I remember trawling freshmeat.net for new and updated packages and themes.org for all my desktop customisation “mods”. In the pre-GitHub world, these were usually hosted on random FTP mirrors or if the project was big and “professional” enough, on sourceforge.net. Although binary packages were most often an afterthought, so ./configure; make; make install was still the order of the day for installing things, which lead to a horrendous mess of packaged and non-packaged software all mashed together reminiscent of Randall Munroe’s Python Hell.

I hadn’t yet made the jump onto IRC or other real-time chat although AIM and ICQ were rising in popularity, but I was on a number of early proto-forums including the very early “Linux Coffee Talk” where I found some of my earliest posts archived.

In a true snapshot of the times, one of my earliest posts I could find dates back to Tuesday, May 1st, 2001 (a few days before I registered this domain) and is a plea for help getting a Zip drive working under the newly-released 2.4 series of Linux kernels.

At 19:06 the same day, I posted a follow-up to some replies with:

I’m too tired to do anything with it now though, I’ve been up for 48 hours straight working on my dissertation :(

Oh boy, do I remember that. I read that post and the memories come flooding back; I’m right back there in my squalid student house, wrestling with kernel compilation options on my cobbled-together Celeron 600Mhz/128Mb RAM/Voodoo 3 setup.

My final year dissertation was in effect, a Linux router/NAS appliance distro; a “proof of concept” of a simple to use system to share internet access, storage and so on. It was based on a short-lived offshoot of Slackware Linux called “Zipslack” , and it was delivered on ZIP Disks which I still have, along with the boot floppy (LILO crew representing) and hundreds of pages of print-outs of my Perl code, Linux kernel configuration and boot scripts. The report I wrote included a snapshot of the common tech stacks circa 2000:

I’d decided to make the admin UI for my project web-based and had analysed the “state of the frontend”. I concluded with the somewhat dating observations that CSS was currently not widely supported enough to consider using, and the best screen resolution to design for was 800x600 in 16-bit colour mode.

The backend was based on standard Perl-based CGI scripts, and although Apache 1.x was pretty widespread, I’d chosen the more lightweight thttpd - apparently it was then the 7th most popular web server in the world, and the benchmarks page for that project show what some of the options were to an late 90s / early 2000s sysadmin. Anyone remember Roxen, Boa or Zeus webservers?

The Paleolithic Era

As the web was really taking off, I’d decided to start my own website project and continue my experiments with HTML. This site was originally hosted on the free family website space I got with our dial-up Freeserve ISP in the UK. It started life as “Mark’s Guitar Page”; a very dated and quintessential GeoCities-style guitar tuition page with lots of rainbow spacer bars, “under construction” gifs, horrendous advice, a page counter, guestbook and probably also a webring banner as well. I built the whole thing using AOL Press and it was as clunky as you’d expect for the era! Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) no usable archives of this exist, the earliest nearly-complete captures I have of the site are when I registered markround.com and set up a PHP-Nuke (remember that?) based site on a shared-hosting LAMP stack.

The newly released PHP4 was then the current hot thing, and by this time the Unix world had largely settled around Apache, although I still came across the odd iPlanet/Netscape server stack at work. Over in Windows land it was all Windows NT-based servers with IIS for everything. Most ISPs and webhosts offered a cgi-bin directory for scripts (yay, FormMail!) and possibly MySQL 3.x.

The site did reasonably well for an early internet project and attracted a small crowd of regulars and guest contributors before I eventually shuttered it due to lack of time, as by then I had started working full-time as a Unix sysadmin/Webmaster/Java developer and the heady days of university were behind me.

Still, the main website continued and gained a delightfully cheesy early-2000s makeover reminiscent of the MySpace era which was only missing a tinny Linkin Park song playing over the splash page for maximum cringe. The state of the art then was using Dreamweaver to produce my (terrible) HTML with lots of JavaScript “on mouse over” magic to make animated buttons, and Macromedia Fireworks to slice up images to embed in clunky table-based layouts. It was around this time that I’d started writing articles and guides for the main systems I was running which as far as I remember were Solaris 7/8/9 on SPARC (one of my earliest articles reviewing Solaris 9 is still on-line), and Slackware 8.0 and Red Hat 6.0 on x86. I also joined a local Linux User Group (hi everyone from back then!) and gave a couple of presentations on Solaris and how to run a production Apache service. Which was, at the time, a shared-hosting service with mod_php4, MySQL 3.x, FTP for uploads and all the security concerns of chrooting all the users. How things have progressed…

root@localhost

As I was focussing more and more on Unix and Linux systems, my website shifted to focus solely on these topics. Here’s the first iteration of my efforts, which I imaginatively titled “root@localhost” complete with logo rendered in The Gimp. I wrote a few articles and due to the fact that this was still the early Web, I ended up getting a pretty high ranking on the search engines of the time. In particular, my article on building Apache 1.3.x with PHP & mod_auth_mysql received a lot of traffic and resulted in me getting approached by Wrox press to do my first stint as a Technical Reviewer and my name in print!

It was around this time that I made my first ever open source contribution - a PHP 4 class for handling LDAP authentication. While it’s truly terrible by my standards today, it was the first time I ever received feedback and even improvements to the code from a user by email. Remember, this is all before git & “pull requests” (I think I had started using CVS at this point) and was a big boost to my confidence. It also helped convince my boss at the time of the value of open source - at the time, it was only just going mainstream (not helped by Microsoft’s “Linux is a cancer” FUD) and a lot of upper management still seemed distrustful of it. Still a little crazy though to see that not only is my class still hosted in the same place, but there have been 43 downloads this week for something written in PHP 4 and abandoned 23 years ago!

One hilarious side-effect of having a site that at the time ranked very highly when you searched for “root@localhost” was that I ended up getting a ton of emails from people I’d never heard of asking for help with random error messages. The default contact email address shown on error pages for the Apache webserver was root@localhost. Lots of sites back then didn’t bother to change the defaults, so when a user saw a page-not-found error on a website, they saw contact root@localhost for support, would chuck that into Google and land on my page. I had to include a “really, I have nothing to do with this, and no I did not break your webserver” page to explain it all.

Trivia time - the console window shown in the logo is actually a screenshot of the QNX 6.x terminal as I was (and still am) quite the OS geek and loved exploring different systems. As well as QNX and other Unix systems such as FreeBSD and Solaris x86, I also ran BeOS for a long time on my home PC as it was by far my favourite OS since the Amiga. I hosted a few pages regarding BeOS, the leaked “Dano” build and hosted a tool where users could submit compatibility reports for software. Of course, Be Inc. died but I now run the nightly builds of the open-source recreation Haiku on one of my hobby systems.

Digital Badger

Don’t ask. I just liked the name and have a thing about badgers, so I set it up digitalbadger.net as a DNS CNAME. Anyway, by this point I’d moved on to an Infrastructure Manager role in charge of a small team running the web infra for a magazine publisher. It was all Solaris-based on a mix of SPARC and the new (at the time) AMD64 systems. Proper early 2000s ENTERPRISE stuff: Fibre-channel everywhere, tape robots, chunky SPARC boxes. A lot of fun and I wrote a bunch of articles around these systems which are still archived on this site.

The common dev stack was mostly PHP based, and I remember a lot of forum administration on platforms like VBulletin and UBBThreads, including the grief of MySQL MyISAM table corruption, and full-table locking bringing down sites on a regular basis. The big tech events I remember during that period were virtualization moving into the mainstream (I recall the heated arguments that, sure, maybe webservers were OK, but no-one in their right mind would ever virtualize a database server!), RHEL 5.0 being released with Xen support, and 64-bit AMD servers starting to really come into their own.

I remember the first AMD64 system I put into production and seeing how utterly it crushed the SPARC box it was replacing; it was pretty clear then that SPARC was a dead end. Although, it wasn’t until 2007 that we finally decommissioned the last E450 server - those things were built like tanks! We also saw the open-sourcing and subsequent demise of Solaris and this new fangled “Ruby” thing that all the cool developers were talking about.

This website was by then on it’s way to a well-established blog, so I’d switched from hand-written HTML in Dreamweaver to a series of dynamic backends again using the then-standard LAMP stack. I eventually ended up settling on Serendipity, which remained the engine behind the site for many years. During that time it followed the trends of the day: I went through many Linux distributions from CentOS to Debian to Ubuntu when that became A Thing; PHP and MySQL upgrades; caching layers, and also a few different webservers including Lighttpd. It was hosted on a series of Solaris and then Linux servers, went back to plain old www.markround.com, eventually became virtualised on Xen, and then moved into the cloud.

I still keep the www. part of this domain and include a redirect from the apex domain back to www.markround.com. Partly because I want to keep as much of my content under the same URL structure as it has for the last 20-odd years, and partly because I kinda like the nod to the past where the World Wide Web was new and trendy and everything was “www” something-or-other.

I also joined the now-defunct Blastwave.org project around 2003. This was a community effort that built packages for Solaris systems similar to e.g. a Debian APT repository. That was a big deal back then as the ancient SysV packaging system on Solaris was horrible, with no dependency resolution or proper integration with Sun’s patching system. We were pretty much the “go-to” site for Solaris open-source software at the time. My blog covered updates on the packages I maintained: PHP, PostgreSQL, Nessus and a few others. Sadly, internal politics and Major Internet Drama™ led me to drop out in 2008. A lot of the maintainers (hey guys!) did move over to the new OpenCSW project though, which still seems to be kinda going. But by that point the writing was on the wall for Solaris, and I’d moved on to pretty much 100% Linux and BSD by then.

Still, I did continue to run some Solaris projects on this site for a while including an IPS package repository and a review of Solaris 11, and that ended up with me doing my second stint as a technical reviewer for the Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook. Whilst I don’t think I’d recommend it as a title, I still got to make a dedication to my now-wife in it, so I did end up gaining some major points there :)

The Age Of Enlightenment

I’d moved back into more hands-on sysadmin work and started picking up DevOps principles and tech - I like to think of it as being “back in the engine room”. I kept running the PHP-based Serenity blog system for a long while and covered the general tech-stack of the times, from a XenServer Review to a set of plugins I created for the Cacti monitoring system. Nowadays it’s all declarative OpenTelemetry stacks but back then, the new hotness was Nagios and Cacti with probably some home-grown Perl clunker still lurking somewhere. That project was also my first introduction to GitHub as I published my first repo along with a XenServer backup script. Both of those got used a fair amount by the community and I got some useful contributions and feedback. It’s cool looking back now to see how much sites like GitHub and GitLab have made it easier to connect with users and developers.

Modern Civilisation

As we were by this point firmly in the Ruby-on-Rails era, I’d picked up a lot of Ruby along the way from working with Rails itself as well as using things like Sensu and Capistrano. I also migrated the blog over to a Jekyll-based static site, marking the end of the LAMP era of this site. While Ruby seems to have been another trend that has fallen out of favour in recent years for general DevOps tasks, I have to say I still love its expressiveness and still use it for new projects.

Anyway, Docker was now the hot new thing (although Kubernetes was just barely out of being a new research project and anyone serious would be using Mesosphere). While this site was by then running happily under docker-compose, I’d started to have a few issues moving non cloud-native software into a containerised world - old in-house or 3rd party applications that were the very antithesis of 12-Factor apps. And back then, you weren’t always guaranteed to find a convenient image for your open-source package of choice, either.

So I wrote Tiller. It was admittedly small fry in the terms of open source projects and stalled some time ago but it’s still managed to (at the time of writing) hit 309,110 downloads from RubyGems, acquire 322 Github stars, have 11 pull requests from other developers merged, and over 2,000 lines of documentation written plus it’s pretty much all I blogged about then.

It’s also the period when my music really started picking up. I started gigging again and produced my first few tracks. That photo of me on the sidebar is from my first gig with my friends when I lived in Surrey. Good memories.

AMIGAAAAAAA

The Pivotal Years. While I was doing some really cool stuff in the tech world - and by this point was leading customer engagements building out production CloudFoundry and Kubernetes clusters across all kinds of environments - I chose to start blogging about something completely different. With all the complexity in the modern tech stack, it’s been really nice to kick back and rediscover the simplicity and beauty of my childhood computers such as the ZX Spectrum and Amiga. My recent articles have made the front page and sometimes the #1 spot on Hacker News and generated a lot of great discussion - and also made my little Kubernetes cluster work overtime for a few days! It’s always a buzz knowing that I’ve connected with people all round the world. Some have reached out to me personally which always makes my day, and takes me right back to my teenage days posting letters and floppy disks, or making contacts over BBS systems.

As well as a bunch of more technical articles on the next-gen AmigaOS 4, I also ended up re-learning C and wrote a system utility called SetCmd which I’m now porting across to the classic 68k-powered Amiga OS. And something really cool happened as well with my music, too. I made a rock cover of an old Amiga demo tune, and it ended up getting shown at a demo conference!

I also got re-acquainted with my ZX Spectrum. I dug my old +3 out of storage and built a community BBS-like site for the old 8-bit system, with 16,000+ games, and tons of other features like messages, comments and articles. It’s even been connected to my BGP AS and the DN42 network! It also made it to the front page of Hacker News, was tweeted by GitHub and an older version even featured in The Spectrum Show #107 on YouTube. The site is still going strong, has a small crowd of regulars and there’s also some exciting retro projects I am working on with other 8-bit developers in the pipeline. Hopefully more on that soon! Watch this space…

The Current Day

And now, a quarter-century on from the start of this site, and around 40 years since I first encountered a computer, here we are! This site is now on something like it’s 10th code-base, and I can’t even count the number of hosting platforms and operating systems it’s been through, although I know it’s had at least 5 CPU architecture changes. I’ve gone from a website built with AOL Press and uploaded by manual FTP (via my mum’s dial-up internet), to a containerized build process, deployed onto a cloud-based cluster with everything expressed as code and pipelined up the wazoo.

At home, I saw the first wave of 8 and 16-bit home computers give way to the IBM PC, and at work I’ve seen the IT world shift from a pre-virtual machine world where commercial Unix ruled supreme, to the modern cloud-native tech world. I do occasionally miss the days where I could describe my job as WEBMASTER with a straight face - and table-based layouts with spinning GIFs were the cutting edge on the frontend - but the stuff we can do today is just incredible.

This site is now managed and deployed in the same kind of way I now advocate for my customers: The website and project infrastructure is all expressed as code and generally runs through CI/CD pipelines that pave infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible, deploy containers using GitOps and so on. All I have to do to publish a post now is make a git commit, or push a branch to production.

The whole thing including control plane, networking and monitoring - and all my projects infrastructure across 3 continents - can be torn down and recreated in minutes with a single click. Even the old Solaris die-hard in me has to admit this is just awesome and despite the challenges of the current cloud-native IT world, it sure beats hand-rolling mod_perl clusters!

What’s Next ?

It’s often said that once something is on the Internet, it never truly disappears. Whilst some of my earliest “digital footprints” can be sometimes embarrassing or cringe-inducing, I’m glad that they’ve been preserved. My older content is simply the views and opinions framed through the experience of a younger person. Although my sentiments may have changed, and I now see some of my old writing and artistic creations as flawed, they’re an honest reflection of where and who I was.

It’s funny really - one of the things that I seem to gravitate towards is building things that bring communities together - whether that’s musicians, networking geeks, or old 8-bit retro-computing enthusiasts. I am - like many other creators I would guess - on the autistic spectrum, and having “unusually intense” hobbies was one of the first hallmarks that helped me get diagnosed as an adult and in recent years I’ve learned to embrace it. In a weird way, these projects help me form connections and share a little of myself that I find difficult in “The Real World”. It’s sometimes been scary to put my whole self out there, but I’m glad I did.

From a personal point of view, it’s great to look back and remember everything from wrestling with broken ZIP drives at University to jobs, colleagues and friends I’ve made over the years. And it’s nothing short of breath-taking to see the pace of change in our industry and remember all the once new and trendy tech stacks that have come and gone. Remember - “this too shall pass”.

I wonder what this site will look like, and what it will be running on when I (hopefully) stop and take my next look back in another 25 years ? See you in 2051…