Maciej Małyszko

A long time ago, on a Pentium MMX–era PC far, far away...

From the abyss of Windows 98, the void of Notepad, and the preview mode of FrontPage Express, my first HTML page emerged — filled with background-image tables and <frameset> navigation. And it was good, although sometimes unpredictable in IE or Netscape. But overall — it was good.

But the World Wide Web waters were still and empty. And then came animated GIFs, mouseover effects, and popup windows. And I said: "Let there be animated GIFs on my pages as well!" And there were.

The first PHP scripts and global variables breathed life into static HTML code. Visit counters and guestbooks wrote data to .txt files — no sanitization, no mercy.

But PHP was alone. Then, by the grace of GPL, MySQL descended, and phpMyAdmin joined them together. And it worked well, though only in Firefox.

include 'header' and session_start() gave rise to the first CMS and admin panels. And the master key that opened every door was admin / admin. Singleton and MVC were the only patterns known to man. And it was good.

The ancient DevOps revealed the truth to the world, sending files one by one over FTP — without putting the server into maintenance mode, without backup, without shame.

The forests of JavaScript libraries blossomed across the horizon, bearing the fruit of lightboxes, sliders, and multilevel dropdown menus, difficult to traverse with a trembling mouse cursor.

Webmasters, armed with Smarty templates and CRUD generators, were ready to slash impossible deadlines. Pretty URLs and tag clouds gave birth to the SEO industry.

Relentless mortals, forged in the fire of format C: and SATA drivers loaded from floppy disks, were granted passage into the underworld of Linux, through RedHat and Mandrake — bundled on CDs with computer magazines.

Delphi and C++ Builder unleashed the creativity of a new generation of coders, ready to ship Windows XP applications — without even knowing that WinAPI existed.

The Internet also came alive through the power of Flash and ActionScript. Buttons cast shadows, intros had preloaders, and designers crafted beautiful and clean forms in Photoshop, powered by the eternal trial license.

When the sheer number of creations overwhelmed even ISDN lines, XMLHttpRequest descended and proclaimed: “You don’t need to reload the whole page.” And everything became faster. And it was good.

Then came jQuery with another powerful message of salvation: “I am the way, the truth, and the only interface. Code once, and it will work in every browser.” And so it was.

And there were many browsers, and Safari walked the land of Windows.

...

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of AI, I will fear no evil, nor usage limits — for I am the ultimate end-user, master and commander, and all technologies shall serve me.

NOT AI-generated. Written by an actual mortal. Respect the copyright || > /dev/null