Digital Rag Reborn (again)

In February of 2000, it was my intention to resurrect the Digital Rag. The hiatus of 3 years had been busy, and there had been a tremendous number of exciting things I'd been involved in during the time that I wanted to share with readers. 

While there are still new articles going into the Digital Rag, I've also started a Blog called the Digital Rag Daily

You may see some of the items in other publications either verbatim or in edited form. I've sold articles in the past and will continue in the future.

I've changed the restricted format of the original, and opened up the list of topics to include all manner of doings of the several companies I'm involved with. I've also added sections on some of the goings on around the Vancouver region.

One of the things I'll continue from the original concept is direct creation onto the readable site. While there probably won't be anything that requires such immediacy in terms of freshness of the content, I'm still of the opinion that the potential interactive response by readers via e-mail or even phone can be beneficial. Nothing in the current issue will be cast in stone, and I expect I'll make changes even after an issue has been archived.

History of The Digital Rag

As one of the first web based online magazines, the Digital Rag served as a forum for my thoughts and opinions on the emerging  commercial Internet. It also served as a "house" magazine for the customers of Wimsey Information Services Inc., our Internet company. In the light of the extremely professional online magazine sites of today, the original 'Rag is pretty dismal. The thing to remember is that at the time the 'Rag was started, the web was still an extremely new and rough medium - lacking even the ability to handle anything other than "GIF" format graphic files. Many of the now accepted paradigms for navigating around a site had not yet been invented.

In December 1995, Wimsey was sold to iSTAR Internet, a national startup that merged 9 companies into one and went public about the time that the sale of Wimsey closed. The months leading up to our sale to iSTAR were pretty busy. Not only was Wimsey continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate of 25-30% per month, but due to the rapid growth, our systems simply hadn't kept up with the bookkeeping that the sale required. I spent from September through to mid December working with accountants during the day and working on system problems in the evening. There was no time for reflection and certainly no time for the Digital Rag.

Since then, PSInet - the purchaser of iSTAR - has gone bankrupt and locally, Telus - the "phone company" has purchased their assets. I'm still getting e-mail at richard @ wimsey.com but it is mostly spam (and Hormel Foods Corporation, the owners of the SPAM label have decried that they won't go after anyone calling unsolicited e-mail spam as long as they don't use all UPPER case). Therein lies a story too - one you'll see soon.

When you look through the archive (1994-1995) you'll note that several of the issues have section headings but minimal or no content. I've left these issues exactly as they appeared. They serve as an interesting study in the evolution of the early days of the medium (and an interesting note on how busy we were at the time).

The first thing to note is that there are no pictures. The browser most used in 1994 was Mosaic, and its initial version didn't handle JPG pictures - the type best suited to continuous tone photographs. Mosaic only dealt with GIF pictures - suitable for block color graphics. We at Wimsey were Unix computer techs more than anything else, so didn't have a MAC around to do up graphics at that time. All of our pages were hand crafted with text editors, and in fact the Digital Rag was written directly in HTML using Unix's standard VI editor - mostly by me.

In the October 1994 issue, a new concept in navigation was added to the publication - a set of text based arrows that allowed the viewer to go "Next", "UP", "Previous" in the flow of the publication. This may seem like an obvious thing, and as you'll note on the pages of this site, it is used with graphical labels and in fact is a built-in function of the FrontPage98 (now FrontPage2000) toolset I'm using to create this web - but in 1994 this was a completely new concept. Many of the items published at that time employed a basic menu system where in order to get to the next page, the reader had to go back to the menu. To a certain extent this reflected the fact that there were no automatic tools to do things like page adds and deletes in the sequence of flow of the documents. Doing a menu with simple URL pointers to subsidiary pages was the easiest way to deal with the complexities.

Wimsey hosted a number of publications on our web site. I feel that the success of the Web creation business around the Vancouver area has a lot to do with the free hosting we provided for many of our customers. The Digital Rag was my contribution to this wealth of new media. Others have adapted the web medium towards the more traditional publications - catalogues, paper publications, and even TV and Radio - but few have truly embraced the web for what it can be, interactive and cooperative and very personal.

I'll take this opportunity to also mention all of the wonderful people who worked with us at Wimsey during the heydays of the Internet revolution. All of them have gone on to new things, many in various aspects of the Internet today.

As of September, 1995, our staff at Wimsey was:

Richard Pitt - CEO, Marketing, Web, Instructor
Stuart Lynne - CTO and technical operations
Bruce Balden - Internet Systems Specialist
Mac McKenzie - Controller
Nick MacDonald - Sales
John Henders - Technical Operations
Bob Elliott - Web Production Manager
Ken Cillis - Accounts Administrator
Suzanne D'Aoust - Programmer/Artist
David Hathaway - Technical Support
Trish dela Paz - Corporate Sales Asst.
Tanja Brand - Reception, Accounts Receivable, Web Design
Shirley Pitt - Reception, Sales Asst., Telephone
Andy Dwelly - Programming and Instructor
Stephanie Fox - Corporate Sales Asst.
Lisa Vogt - Corporate Sales
Lauri Martell - Sales