From Dial-Up to Digital Media

    It all began with a scrapbook, brought to life on a PC with a whopping 40-megabyte (40 MB) hard drive. Nobody took a class or hired a designer. Early photographs were taken with a 35mm camera, processed, printed, scanned one at a time, and uploaded to the internet. The files were enormous by the standards of the day, and every page was uploaded slowly over a telephone connection—sometimes overnight.

    Early feedback from visitors was both encouraging and invaluable: "Your pages are great, but they take too long to load. Try uploading only a few pictures on one page and then link to the next page." Those simple suggestions helped transform what could have been a dead-end project into a website that would eventually be featured by the New York Times.

    More importantly, they confirmed something we had already begun to realize: the history of the WASP wasn't just interesting—it was captivating. And in 1996, almost no one on the emerging World Wide Web knew anything about these remarkable women. Despite the slow connections and endless uploading challenges, WASP on the WEB was selected as a Yahoo Pick of the Week.

    Meanwhile, internet technology changed almost monthly. New design and animation software appeared just as quickly, and many of the interactive features we created—such as the paper dolls and Morse code activities—eventually became unsupported. Rather than remove them, we chose to leave them on the original site as an archival reminder of the early days of the web. Of course, there were also those inevitable broken links as other websites disappeared or moved to new locations.

    As music and audio became part of the project, .ra and .ram files joined the collection, requiring hours to upload over dial-up connections. Those files remain on the site today, archived alongside the Macromedia Flash projects, .swf and other multimedia features that modern browsers can no longer display.

    As the technology improved, so did the ways we could tell the WASP story. What follows is a collection of the music, videos, presentations, and other multimedia projects created over the years to preserve their history, celebrate their achievements, and share their remarkable legacy with new generations.