Marc Cellucci
This is actually not the first personal website I ever made.
In college, I got a job as tech support for the Energy Systems Lab at Texas A&M. This largely involved reinstalling Windows 3.1 over and over again when it inevitably started acting up.
It was there, on a DEC Alpha workstation, that I first saw Mosaic. I was entranced. The fact that you could click links on pages and they would take you to totally different pages online absolutely blew me away. This was well before EC sites and the like, and it was largely students just making long, single pages filled with links to stuff they dug.
I soon started learning HTML and made my very first page, which was called “The Cellucci Express Rolls On.” It was, as you might expect, a long page of links and images, with the requisite tiled background and “under construction” gifs. It was more of a glorified bookmark list than anything, so I don’t really count it as a full-out website.
Sadly, it’s lost to the sands of time, and I didn’t make a backup. But I did replace it with this site, which actually divided things into subsections, and used the amazing new trick that was all the rage in those days — an image map for the navigation menu, complete with a guitar in the background.
This was the late ’90s, and dark and edgy was the thing. My site reflects this, so there’s an embarrassing picture of me trying to look pensive while sitting on railroad tracks. And look at that Impact font! I’m proud to say that my use of the font predated all the memes that still use it to this day.
Other features include some of my early music, roughly recorded on a 4-track tape deck (save for “The City,” which was done on my friend Harry’s reel-to-reel machine). There are pictures of my old gear, most of which I still have, some random gaming related stuff, and the requisite resume and wall of links. The stamp in the lower left is my name in katakana, and the bear head next to it is just something random that I thought was cute.
It’s always embarrassing to look at your kindergarten drawings, but aside from it being way too dark, I don’t think this site is terrible. There are no background textures or blinking objects, so that’s something, right?
I’ve archived it here, so if you dare, enter the dark, edgy world of Marc’s First Site.
