Well, First of All Welcome to the Very First Blog Post

Well, First of All Welcome to the Very First Blog Post

The intention for the first blog post was always planned to reiterate just how many years experience design dpi has under it's belt, by showcasing the very first website designed back in 1997.

This 'was' the plan at least. Having suffered countless dead hard drives over the years, backing up has become quite an obsessive compulsive disorder. So much so that there are backups of backups, of backups going back to 1997 and the very first websites.

The first backup to try is on an old CD-Rom, fair enough it's a bit scratched (it must be over 12 years old)! But still, the disc plays first time out of the box and you can navigate all the folders. Finding the very first website folder is easy enough but alas, it appears this folder is the only one on the disc which is non responsive... "Sufferin' succotash"!

OK, all is not lost... remember there are backups of backups, right? What about those old 3.5" floppies in the loft? Well it took months to pluck up the courage to go up there, but once the discs were retrieved the only machine available with a floppy drive is an old Toshiba Satellite S1800 laptop... what do you know, the floppy drive is dead and the laptop thinks it's 1st January 2000.

Next idea is to purchase an external USB Floppy Drive from that site named after a river in South America, thinking £9.99 is nothing to retrieve the very first website design? So out of the 13 'original' sites backed up (one site on each floppy), the very first disk pops up a window "You need to format the disk in drive A: before you can use it". Don't think so, there's data on there? All the other 12 disks read perfectly fine... we're not having much luck here are we?

So if the other disks are OK, maybe it's a Windows 7 thing? Oh well, last ditch attempt resorts to rebuilding a very old machine running Windows XP. Getting five minutes of life out of the box, voilà! Only to discover the floppy contents show version 2.0 of the website... NOT the original design!

After all that effort the frustration turns to disappointment. Still hopeful one day to stumble across a backup on one of the thousands of backup DVD's, even if it's just a screen grab... there is one, somewhere?

The hunt is on, it may take some time and patience but while searching through the old backups for the ever elusive first design, when something of interest crops up it may make it onto the blog.

Watch this space,