Dinosaur Sighting: Microsoft FrontPage for Windows 95

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In October of 1995, just a few short months after Microsoft launched Windows 95, a company called Vermeer Technologies launched what it called a World Wide Web publishing and site management tool called FrontPage 1.0. The application featured a WYSIWYG HTML editor, an Explorer tool, which provided you with a graphical view of your page links, and a personal Web server, which allowed you to preview your site locally. There were many other great features included in the package such as the ability to create threaded discussion groups, a collection of templates, automated scripts called WebBots, and much more.

FrontPage 1.0 was such a great tool and worked so well with Internet Explorer, the Microsoft couldn’t stand not being in control of it. Plus the fact that at the time Microsoft was heatedly competing with Netscape Communications which at the time was working on a similar products: a Web site manager called LiveWire and an HTML editor called Netscape Navigator Gold.

In January 1996, just 2 months after Vermeer launched FrontPage; Microsoft acquired Vermeer and soon began the process of Microsofting FrontPage. In June of 1996, just 6 months later, the product was reborn as Microsoft FrontPage 1.1.and sported a host of new and improved features including close integration with Microsoft Office. The new version carried a retail price of $149, down from the $695 that Vermeer charged for the 1.0 version.

In this gallery of images, I’ll show you what Microsoft FrontPage 1.1 looked like.

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Microsoft FrontPage for Windows 95 came on 6 floppy disks.

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At just 21 pages, the manual was very slim, but was just designed to provide you with installation information and an overview of the feature set. The real documentation was in the context-sensitive Help system.

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You can tell from the image on the box and the manual that FrontPage was destined to be a part of the Office suite. As you can see here, the tilted square design of the FrontPage product logo matched those from the rest of Office 95. In fact, the FrontPage user interface was adapted to be very consistent with Microsoft Office.

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There was a ReadMe.txt file on the first floppy disk. Check out the paltry PC Configuration Recommendations.

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The splash screen clearly identified this as version 1.1.

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The first few pages of the Setup wizard prompted you with questions about you configuration like which components you wanted to install.

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Once the installation procedure was underway, you could monitor the progress in several ways. As you can see here, the early versions of Setup not only displayed a standard progress bar, but it also displayed three gas gauge meters that showed the file copy operation from disk to folder, from installation media to hard disk, as well as an approximation of the total usage of the hard disk. You don’t see those gas gauge meters anymore.

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Once setup was complete, the FrontPage Explorer and the FrontPage Personal Web Server were up and ready for you to begin creating a Web site.

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One of the hot features of FrontPage were the templates and Web Wizards that prompted the user for information about what they wanted to include in their Web site based on the wizard they launched and created the pre-linked Web site of template pages. All the user had to do once the Wizard was finished was to go back to each of the pages and fill in the details. Here, you can see the launch of the Corporate Presence Web Wizard.

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As you worked through the Corporate Presence Web Wizard, you selected the type of pages that you wanted. The Home page was a given but you could add other main pages including a Feedback Form and a Search Form. These forms were created by the FrontPage WebBots, which automatically generated CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts.

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The Web Wizard would also allow you to select presentation style and color scheme. It would also allow you to insert the Men Working icon on pages that were incomplete.

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The To Do List was a very nice feature in that it provided you with a way to keep track of tasks that yet needed to be completed.

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If multiple people were working on a site, you could assign tasks to individuals. In addition, you could name the task, provide a description and even set its priority.

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The FrontPage Explorer was a key component in the product’s Web administration system in that it provided you with several ways to view your Web site. The Link view provided you with visual representation of your site and allowed you to select a page and see all the links to and from that page.

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The Summary view provided you with a way to get detailed information about each file in your Web site.

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The FrontPage Editor was renowned at the time because it was really the first WYSIWYG HTML editor. You designed the page using the extensive word processor like feature set and it automatically generated all the HTML code in the background.

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The FrontPage Editor had for its time, a great Forms editor and with the Form WebBot, to handle the data—saving it in any of the available formats and even emailing it—implementing forms on a Web site were easy.

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The Search Bot provided a form that allowed full text searching of the Web site.

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The Discussion Bot allowed you to create and manage a discussion group on your Web site. The Discussion Bot collected information from a form, formatted it into an HTML page, and then added the page to a table of contents as well as to an index.

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FrontPage made it easy to manage the color scheme of your Web site with the centralized Web Colors page. If you changed the colors on this one page, the colors on whole Web site would change.

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You could use Internet Explorer to easily preview your Web site.

Image created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.

In October of 1995, just a few short months after Microsoft launched Windows 95, a company called Vermeer Technologies launched what it called a World Wide Web publishing and site management tool called FrontPage 1.0. The application featured a WYSIWYG HTML editor, an Explorer tool, which provided you with a graphical view of your page links, and a personal Web server, which allowed you to preview your site locally. There were many other great features included in the package such as the ability to create threaded discussion groups, a collection of templates, automated scripts called WebBots, and much more.

FrontPage 1.0 was such a great tool and worked so well with Internet Explorer, the Microsoft couldn’t stand not being in control of it. Plus the fact that at the time Microsoft was heatedly competing with Netscape Communications which at the time was working on a similar products: a Web site manager called LiveWire and an HTML editor called Netscape Navigator Gold.

In January 1996, just 2 months after Vermeer launched FrontPage; Microsoft acquired Vermeer and soon began the process of Microsofting FrontPage. In June of 1996, just 6 months later, the product was reborn as Microsoft FrontPage 1.1.and sported a host of new and improved features including close integration with Microsoft Office. The new version carried a retail price of $149, down from the $695 that Vermeer charged for the 1.0 version.

In this gallery of images, I’ll show you what Microsoft FrontPage 1.1 looked like.

Image created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.

By Greg Shultz

Greg Shultz is a freelance Technical Writer. Previously, he has worked as Documentation Specialist in the software industry, a Technical Support Specialist in educational industry, and a Technical Journalist in the computer publishing industry.

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