An evolution over time: My personal website while a student at the University of Southern California
(August 1995-May 2000)

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MSEnetMSEnetMSEnetMSEnet
*TIMELINE*
First...ARPAnetMSEnetv2.0Mike.NetLIGHTVersion3Vier****ellars.com

"Well, let's see: First, the earth cooled, and then the dinosaurs came. But they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came, and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes, I couldn't believe it..." [Jacobs in the movie Airplane!]

"The global Internet's progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defense." [Michael Hauben, History of ARPANET] ARPANET quickly developed an independent, community-oriented population that promoted the free distribution of information. The inhabitants of the ARPANET community would eventually begin publishing more than text-based scientific information. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a "gloabal hypertext system" that we now call the World Wide Web.

MSEnet was the next logical step in the evolution of content for the Internet's World Wide Web. Originally developed in the early autumn months of 1995, MSEnet would go through at least three major revisions before its inherent technology would be surpassed by its author's new project. The few records chronicling the early development of MSEnet to survive intact are presented here.

MSEnet v2.0 was the first major revision of MSEnet (circa Spring 1996). It was also the first version to have a coherent plan of development in place before it went into development. Featuring a highly customizable user interface, its features predated widespread understanding (and browser support) of DHTML and CSS.

Mike.Net was a spin-off of MSEnet v2.0 dating from late 1996. It used the same customizing technologies to present content aimed at people named "Mike." There really wasn't much point to the site, and it languished, with almost no content, until it was abandoned at the next major redesign of MSEnet.

LIGHT was a content experience that became the predecessor for the next full redesign of MSEnet. Unfortunately, the only page of this experiment to survive is the introduction (home) page; however, much of the content was re-used in the next iteration of MSEnet.

MSEnet Version3 built upon the content-centered concept of LIGHT and focused on a relatively narrow theme: Architecture. This major redesign featured information and tools related to the technical and theoretical aspects of the profession, as well as detailed pages about the site itself and its author. As testament to its inherent genius, Version3 survived almost three years and received at least one award.

MSEnet Vier was more of a conceptual proof than a finished product, and it never went "live" as a redesign. I went for shock value and made it with a bright yellow stripe down the left over a bright red background, with green, yellow, and white highlights. For some strange reason, no one I showed it to liked it. Access to Vier is restricted by a dynamic script-based maze.

msenet**** was the last major redesign of MSEnet, and it was my first attempt at creating a site with Cascading Style Sheets. (MSEnet v2.0 used a similar technology, but relied upon JavaScript and browser cookies to achieve it.) Created during my final year at USC, I never spent as much time on it as I would have liked, concentrating instead on my architecture studio classes.

With only six months to go before graduation, and thus the loss of my "free" USC web site, I began the transition to my vanity domain: ellars.com. MSEnet "died" in September 2000, only to be resurrected as MSEnet.org in January 2003.