The CIS website was created in July, 1999 and the first version was largely complete by September 26th of the same year. The current version was begun shortly thereafter, and was mostly complete by the end of 1999. The last major update was September 18, 2000.
The site was originally coded by hand with a text editor in HTML, but the current version was created with Netscape Composer. It is what would today be called a "Web 1.0" site. There are no flash videos or java applets - they were not common at the time on non-commercial pages. At one time there was a visitor counter, a chatroom, and a guestbook, but they relied on third party services and have long since come to pass.
The site was created by my best friend and I when we were 14 years old. I did the majority of the design, and he contributed almost all of the original text - all of "CIS Records" was his work. I haven't seen him in almost as long, and he is now an editor for a major newspaper - a testament to his writing skill. We spent many nights playing Privateer 2, and the "Conflict at Nav 111" is the true story of a long night we spent fighting off the CIS after we decided to go rogue and began attacking civilian ships. I enjoyed Privateer 2 more than any game before or since - the level of detail in the CCN Booth system records was the inspiration for the site. This site is perhaps one of the oldest continually online Privateer 2 pages on the web.
The /sk/cis directory came from limitations of Angelfire at the time - you had to choose a leading two letter directory from a list of predetermined choices, and you could then fully customize it from there (hence the obvious /cis). I chose /sk because it was the closest Privateer 2-like option available. I reasoned that /sk was an abbreviation for "Skecis," one of the in-game ships. The rest, as they say, is history.
All graphics are 256 color GIFs, some animated. They were scanned from the game manual and laboriously cleaned up in MGI Photosuite 6.5 - my favorite photo editor, even today. Other images, especially the animated ones, came from all around the 1998-2000 World Wide Web. A great portion of the text was scanned from the "Privateer 2 Official Guide" and converted with an OCR, then manually edited for errors.
The site was designed to load quickly on a 33.6k dial-up connection, and so runs like a dream on a modern broadband connection. I was limited to 5 MB when the site was founded, and the entire site weighs in at around 3.9 MB. I see that over the years Angelfire was kind enough to raise that limit to 20 MB, giving me ample room for expansion. I find the advertisements to be excessive these days (they were always annoying, even then), but free is free, and a 14 year old kid couldn't afford to spend money on a hobby website. Privateer 2 was the first game I actually bought with my own money, carefully saved up from odd jobs and the like. It will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Long ago, I forgot my Angelfire password, and while cleaning out my old files in 2017, I happened upon an old sheet of passwords I had written down. The password was on that list, and I was able to regain access to my old site and am once again able to edit and control it. There are a few modernizations I'd like to make, and perhaps I will. At present time, the Wing Commander CIC has much of the same content I have here (and more).
Many years ago, the Wing Commander CIC was kind enough to offer to host my site, but I didn't take them up on the offer for reasons of principle. I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't be able to say that the CIS website is still at its original address after nearly two decades. I still would like to take the time to thank them for the very generous offer, however.
There were things I wanted to do back then that I couldn't, mostly due to technological limitations. I was not able to capture images from the game, except from FMV, and I can now do that easily. I have finally been able to add the real CIS logo to the main page. The original logo that I created for the site is below. Thanks for visiting, and feel free to contact me via my email on the main page. My Yahoo email account has been around just as long!
This article was written on Sunday, October 28, 2017 at 23:00 hrs.
