Happy Birthday to Us!

 

From Dial-Up to Digital: The 1996 Story

It’s hard to imagine now, but when Andalucia.com first flickered into existence on 17 April 1996, the “Information Superhighway” was more of a rough dirt track. Back then, the internet was a world of high-pitched dial-up modem tones and Internet for Dummies guidebooks.

As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we’re recalling the steps that led us to launch the website.

A sabbatical, a problem, and a postcard

The seeds were sown long before the first line of code was written. In 1989, a young civil engineer named Chris Chaplow was granted a sabbatical year out from his engineering position in Carlisle. Together with his partner Michelle, they set off on a backpacking journey across South America & Central America. 

Having learned basic Spanish while on their travels, and fomented a fondness for Hispanic culture, Chris and Michelle decided to emigrate to Madrid. Yet a challenge awaited them: Chris’s British engineering qualifications could not be easily convalidated in their new country, due to the differences between Spanish and British university accreditations.

A chance postcard from a friend in Gibraltar provided the solution: Chris worked as a civil engineer in Gibraltar, while Michelle set up home near Estepona. At weekends, they explored the region together, capturing landscapes, white villages, and local fiestas through Michelle’s camera lens. Michelle had discovered photography on the South America trip using Chris’s manual Olympus camera, and she turned professional in 1993.

Chris worked as a civil engineer during the week, and he and Michelle spent weekends exploring the region, capturing the landscapes, white villages, and local fiestas through Michelle’s camera lens.

The early 1990s – new networks

In the early 90s, minimal travel information existed in English about inland Andalucia. While Michelle captured the region’s diverse beauty and built an extensive image library, Chris was experimenting with a 1200 baud (bits per second) modem and an Amstrad PC2286 desktop computer, networking computers, scanning slides and negatives, and setting up an online bulletin board for photos with (phone-in connection).

1992 was a memorable year: Barcelona hosted the Olympics, Madrid was European Capital of Culture, Seville held the Expo 92 - and Chris and Michelle were married in Sotogrande.

The next stage came in 1994, when a British magazine editor friend of Chris gave him a computer diskette containing Spry Mosaic, an early web browser which was the first mass-use public browser. These diskettes were given away as freebies attached to UK computer magazines at the time, so that gift was invaluable to Chris in Estepona.

“A light bulb moment was when I realised that a printed magazine or newspaper disposes of each edition’s contents as soon as the next one is published, whereas on the internet that content is cumulative.” Chris Chaplow

It started with a Tizz

On 15 October 1995, Chris Chaplow and his university friend Chris Mason launched Tizz.com. “The Information Zone” offered a compendium of Spanish links, using a simple text editor to write the HTML code and an FTP program to upload to the contracted Internet web server. At the time, even Yahoo.com only had 56 references to Spain and none for Andalucia.

“In March 1996 we had three elements in place: the internet publishing know-how, thousands of images of Andalucia, and an engineering desire to organise the information. Andalucia.com was the obvious platform”.Chris Chaplow

The transition from Tizz.com to Andalucia.com was still leap of faith. It cost $100 to register the domain in the US and £250 for annual (UK) hosting, a serious investment as funds were tight.

On 17 April 1996, Chris and Michelle finally received confirmation that Andalucia.com was registered. To give some context, in 1995 only around 25,000 websites existed worldwide. Today that number is 1.34 billion.  

1996: the birth of a giant

In March 1996, Michelle had started freelancing as a corresponsal gráfica (photographer) for the state press agency EFE. She won the government tender government tender from Turespaña (Spanish Tourist Board) to photograph 700 km of the Spanish coastline, stretching from Alicante in the east to Huelva in the west. Michelle took 10,000 images on medium-format slide file and submitted 2,000, of which 1,000 were selected to become part of the national tourism archive. The ones that were not selected have subsequently been used in publications and image libraries all over the world.

Michelle’s expanding image bank attracted a number of clients, including the BBC, the Automobile Association, and locally, Andalucía Magazine, a trilingual (English, Spanish and German) glossy publication which ran from 1995-1997.

On 17 April 1996, at a dinner hosted by the Andalucia magazine at Villa Tiberio restaurant in Marbella, Chris announced his Andalucia.com project. And the rest, as they say, is history!

When I told John Graham proprietor [of Andalucia Magazine] about my proposed project - Andalucia.com - that evening in the restaurant, he replied: 'I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but let's toast it!' Chris Chaplow

Thirty years, over 11,000 regularly updated pages, and a quarter of a million monthly visitors later, Andalucia.com is still independently run. Michelle and Chris are proud to have a team of professional writers, photographers, programmers and other staff members with insider knowledge and, most importantly, a passion for Andalucia. Andalucia.com would like to thank the sponsoring partners who have trusted the website to promote their businesses over the years.

As Andalucia.com celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, the team looks forward to sharing more interesting stories and anecdotes from the last three decades in the upcoming newsletters.