World's First True E-Novels 1996: Documented History
1996 First Hosting (Subdomain). When we first went on line (traditional first light or programmer's "hello world") in spring 1996, we initially used a local San Diego hosting company called Electriciti (eciti.com). I was able to locate a snippet of our early existence online in 2015. To the best of my ability to reconstruct the past, we kept our pages on eciti dot come until they lapsed, while simultaneously cutting over to the new CTF site at serve dot com. Brian was always a meticulous, slow designer who did not rest until everything was perfect, so our emergence on line as Clocktower Fiction did not occur until well into 1997. In the meantime, we continued publishing stories (novels and shorts) at Neon Blue Fiction and The Haunted Village, linked under the CTF aegis as these pages will shortly show.
As this snippet shows, we would log on at the Electriciti dot com website by entering our login ID (~sdjtc) plus a password. We then had access to the two subfolder websites, which were thv (The Haunted Village for our sf/f/h) and nbf (Neon Blue Fiction for mystery/suspense/thriller fiction).
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Preserved Fragment. I managed to find a fragmentary record of our 1996 existence in 2015 at Electriciti, our first hosting company. Using this screen capture fragment, I have linked this page to two current museum sites (not the original, but close): here (new stand-alone replica website) and here (museum pages at Café Okay dot com). The original pages are long vanished, but we kept iterative files, which I was able to reconstruct in the early 2000s. What you see on those replica pages is the look and feel of 1997-1998 for the most part.
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Friends of the Project 1996. Among the friends witnessing the 1996 publication of Neon Blue Fiction and The Haunted Village were K.B., L.F., and J.J. All three were employed at the same software firm as Brian and I during this period. Each is invited to contact JTC as indicated near top of this page. Brian left that firm for another in 1996, and I left in early 1997. I'd love to hear from our friends again, since they will undoubtedly have some historically valuable memories and insights of that period.
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