I worked at a startup in 1997/1998 to write a turn-key intranet application for bioinformatics search and analysis services. It had interfaces for people and fo

I worked at a startup in 1997/1998 to write a turn-key intranet application for bioinformatics search and analysis services. It had interfaces for people and for machines. It wasn't internet based because it dealt with potentially proprietary data, which customers didn't want out on the public network. It was a bunch of CGI scripts in Perl behind httpd, and some command-line executables. I rolled my own template language for it ("mhtml" for "macro html"). We had never heard of using a database for the web, and so it tracked no user information outside of simple logging. It used a couple of lines of Javascript - my first in shipping code - but no CSS. I didn't use CSS until 2000.