The Web
I created my first web pages on the now defunct Geocities sometime in 1996, for a radio show I was doing at the uni station 2NUR. I kept the code, to remind me of the joys of nested tables, but not a blink tag in sight. I remember the web being a lot more grey back then and some excitement of upgrading to Netscape 2. I don’t remember every using Mosaic, but I have used Lynx text based browser.
PHP
It was not until I discovered PHP around 2003, that I started towards more serious web development and away from desktop. The company I was working at needed a better issue tracker than Excel spreadsheets, and a web search turned up Mantis. I had access to a spare Windows server machine, installed Apache, MySQL and PHP and the system was up and running the next day.
Mantis also opened my eyes to the GPL. Not only was software freely available to use, but with languages like PHP I could go through source code, which was a great way to learn.