First Websites | How it began
With the launch of the new website also a launch into history was made. Did Scintilla always have a website? And what features are we missing that were implemented in earlier versions of our association’s website? The Vonk editorial team talked to Scintilla Alumni to stitch together the timeline of Scintilla’s websites from 2008 back to 1994.
2007 - 2003
The changes in the backend at the end of 2007 can be read in the Old Website article made by Jort, published a couple weeks ago. With still a Roxen back-end but some parts already written in PHP, at the end of this timeline the changes were already coming. Going back in the years with the internet archive this website did not have a lot of visual changes. Scintilla’s style was a bit different than we are used to now, with a lot of blue and darker red. Sadly, due to not embedding every graphic on the site, not the full glory of this era can be admired. In this time however a lot of extra sponsors came around for which space had to be made available on the homepage which became longer with also a more expanded side menu. A nice feature that was added on this new website was a counter at the bottom logging the inbound and outgoing bandwith utilization of the Scintilla network.
2002 - 1999
The change between 2002 and 2003 was mostly a visual one, in the period from 2002 to 1999 we can see a whole other design.
Final design concept of the Scintilla website from 1999 up to 2002 made by Jasper Jeroen Dik
1999 - 1994
In this period not one website but 2 or 3 different ones quickly followed up one another. The first website that can still be visited with the internet archive is from 1997. To give you some perspective: not all machines could even play music, they were not powerful enough. Therefore, the Scintilla server streamed the music to every workstation in the Scintilla Room, it was called Soepkip radio.
The website in 1997 as seen in the internet archive
Before 1996 the amount of websites and how they looked is sadly a bit faded. A couple of things are still very sure, in 1994 the first website of Scintilla was built and e-mail was setup for active Scintilla members. This was for a lot of people the first and only e-mail address they had. The website was a real ‘uithangbord’ and one of the first website at the university. First the website was hosted on its machine name utelscin.el.utwente.nl. With some savyness and contact with the then responsible person for the ‘.nl’ domain we ‘registered’ scintilla.nl. But later because of the rise of more UT websites and the implied hierarchy that was desired by UTwente central IT administration it had to be changed to scintilla.utwente.nl with no redirect from the first name.
While the website was a nice to have and a team effort of our administrator-team (SOT), far more important was the network in the Scintilla room itself. With more than six computers, connected to the web, to work of this was a hub for downloading content on your own harddrives. To give you some perspective what the network was like I’d like you to redirect to yearbook pieces of 1995 and 1997 (in Dutch). Because the Electrical Engineers of Scintilla had access and the know how to work with the hardware the association was one of the pioneering organisations on the IT front.
Closing and thank you note
Since the establishment of Scintilla’s Operator Team in 1988 there is a lot more to uncover about how the IT systems of Scintilla worked, were structured and changed over time. If you want to share your story about the old websites or IT systems, don’t hesitate to contact The Vonk. I want to give my special thanks to Fred van Dijk VP, Sander Ruitenbeek, Martijn Damen VP, Jasper Jeroen Dik VP, Eric Lammerts VP and Arjen Krabbendam for replying to my messages, the nice chats about the IT systems of Scintilla they worked on and the material for in this article.