The world book encyclopedia that came with the boxed set of 25 CDs that we bought along with our computer was simply awesome. Long before wikipedia and Google, this multimedia encyclopedia was simply awesome. There were several pictures, articles on any topics you could think of along with sounds and even 3d tours of museums and locations. It was simply mind blowing.
One day, while I was going through the different sectionof the software, I stumbled across a part of the CD which claimed that you could create a website using the software. I started to explore it. In less than 1 hour, I was able to create a webpage with text and pictures. I was so happy with the results.
When my brother came back, I showed to him what I had done and he was very happy. But as always, he was a person who always wanted to push the limit. So he asked me if there is anything more I wanted to do. He asked me rather than using the inbuilt templates and layouts, what about creating a completely new webpage from scratch, according to your wishes ? Until then, I did not even think that was possible.
He asked me to open notepad. Asked me to type in a few code words like <HTML>, <BODY> and <b>. He then asked me to save it as a ‘.html’ file. Once I did that and opened that in my browser, wow ! I had running webpage, which I had. I could not believe what I saw.
In the following days, we explored Tomcat, talked about apache server, hosting your own website at home by configuring the correct ports and redirecting it using IIS and so on