Despite so much of the early Web development happening at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the amount of material on the Web about the university was surprisingly minimal and ad hoc. NCSA had developed web pages for their organization and also a rich site for the Krannert Art Museum (mostly to demonstrate the graphic capabilities of Mosaic). In order to have some sort of university-level information for their demonstration site, NCSA had requested and received a publicity brochure from the Office of Public Affairs, and translated it into hypertext. This brochure was long on photos, but had only the most superficial information about the university.
The Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO) had a server on-line with a web page for university-level information. However, the developer of that page, Ed Krol, was on leave at that time to promote his best-selling book, The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog. All that existed on the page was an image that changed automatically according to the current weather conditions, linked to the local weather forecast. This was technically a neat trick (requiring intelligent parsing of the local weather forecast), but limited in its utility.
There were also some UIUC sites with reasonable information that was restricted in scope. For example, Ed Kubaitis of CCSO had developed a rich set of indices to information available (mostly elsewhere on the web) of interest to the College of Engineering. The Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, the College of Agriculture and the Graduate College, and the student societies of Eta Kappa Nu and Association for Computing Machinery had pages available.
While there was a list of all the servers on campus, it was organized from a technology point of view - what computers hosted information instead of what information was provided. The sites also varied greatly in the amount and type of information served. The College of Agriculture, for example, used their web site mostly for training (e.g. how to use electronic mail) while the Department of Computer Science used its site to present reference material, centered around their advising handbook.
It was somewhat surprising how ad hoc and scattered the UIUC Web was. I believe that one reason why the UIUC Web was underpopulated was because so much Web development was happening at NCSA. Energetic computer science students who wanted to do something with the neat new technology were quickly hired by NCSA to work on Web tools, instead of playing on their own to develop Web content.
Another problem that was not unique to UIUC was that this technology landed in a gap between traditional departmental responsibilities. CCSO had the technical skills needed to publish on the Web, but were not chartered to do content development. The Office of Public Affairs and the Office of Publications develop documents for external and internal consumption, respectively, but had no experience with the Internet. To complicate matters, this medium needed to serve both internal and external consumers of information.
Furthermore, while at that time the technical underpinnings of the Web were complete, and Vice-President Al Gore had popularized the phrase "information superhighway", very few people had ever heard of the Internet. Even fewer had heard of the World-Wide Web. Of those who had heard of the Web, a significant number were certain that it would be at worst a mere fad, or at best quickly replaced by something more technologically advanced. The unfulfilled promises of multimedia and "the paperless office" had jaded many into a "wait-and-see" stance.
It was into this void that I jumped. I first developed pages for what was then my research group, the Illinois Genetic Algorithm Laboratory (IlliGAL). But what really got me started on university-level information was registering for classes in April of 1994. I got extremely frustrated at having to continuously move back and forth between the departmental graduation requirements, the course descriptions, and the schedule of when and where classes were offered. I recognized that this was a perfect application of hypertext, so developed a Web version of the Courses Catalog and Timetable, first for General Engineering classes and then for all classes in the College of Engineering and the Mathematics Department.
Because there wasn't a page for the General Engineering department where the lab's page and the registration material could be listed, I created a page for the General Engineering department. Because there wasn't a good place to list the General Engineering department or the college-level class information, I created a page for the College of Engineering.
At this point, I notified CCSO that the pages existed, and asked if they could perchance find some disk space available to me, as I was running close to my quota on my student account. This lead to my being offered, the next semester, an assistantship as Webmaster for the university. (As a graduate assistant, my salary was low enough that CCSO could easily afford to take a risk on this novel medium.) Thus, in August of 1994, I was given carte blanche to develop Web resources, with the explicitly broad directive, "Go do great things."
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