My first website is still online

I started programming with Pascal in 8th grade. Pascal was a very good starting point back then. I quickly learned the basics of programming and created my first game. It was a snake game running on the console like we had on Nokia phones. Unfortunately, I could not find the source code or any screenshot of my game 🙁

My game development adventure ended when I met with web development in 1999. As I remember those were the days that Perl was dominating the web application domain. PHP wasn’t running on Zend engine and Javascript was just 4 years old.

Internet access was very limited in Turkey and it was almost impossible to find Turkish resources about programming. That’s why I wanted to share my little knowledge about Perl with my Turkish fellows. But there was a problem. I didn’t have a credit card to buy a domain name or pay for the hosting. I found a free hosting service that gave a small disk space and created my first website (erdemkose.azit.com) titled “CGI with Perl” in 1999. It is still online thanks to Internet Archive. I would like to thank them for providing this excellent service.

I remember checking my visitor counter at the bottom of the page every day. That was the only free way to measure visitor engagement. It was 6 years before Google launched Analytics.