Windows on the Web: Tracing NABE’s E-History

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

 NABE News has spent the last few issues looking back at NABE’s history in anticipation of the 50th Annual Meeting in October. This edition of Windows on the Web will look at the history of NABE’s electronic efforts, and how they’ve transformed the speed at which NABE communicates with its members. Most of you are familiar with the website, but our electronic efforts go back a lot farther than that.

Lots of Dead Trees

At one time, NABE killed lots and lots of trees in order to get information to its members. While these various publications had different production schedules, over the course of the year NABE members would receive all this by mail (we didn’t call it “snail mail” back then):

• Four issues of Business Economics
• One annual Membership Directory
• Six issues of NABE News
• Six issues of Employment Opportunities
• Four NABE outlooks
• Four industry surveys
• Two policy surveys

Over the years, we’ve gradually shifted. Now the only publication that arrives in the mail is Business Economics, while the rest arrive electronically. This is the story of how that shift happened.

The Squeal of the Modem

Around 1987, NABE, then headquartered in Cleveland, first went online when it set up a computer electronic bulletin board system (BBS) to more quickly get time-sensitive information to members. In particular, putting job openings online as soon as they arrived at the NABE office, rather than holding them for a bimonthly newsletter, would give members a better chance for those jobs.

At the time, using BBS systems was a hobby of mine, and so when I saw a notice in NABE News that NABE had a BBS, I fired up my 300-baud modem on my Atari 800 computer (for you youngsters out there, that meant the modem communicated at 300 bits per second, or between 35 and 40 characters per second) and logged on. Luckily, I lived in Cleveland, which meant that it was a local phone call and I wasn’t incurring long distance charges as the words slowly straggled across the phone line. I left a message that I was a local member, I knew something about BBS systems, and I had some ideas on how NABE could use this system for enhanced communications with members.

My offer was accepted, and soon I was out at the NABE office in suburban Cleveland, where I learned that the BBS was housed in an ultra-sophisticated IBM AT clone, with an enormous 20-MB hard drive (it will be impossible to ever fill that up, I thought), and a monochrome amber-on-black monitor. It connected to the world via a US Robotics 9600- baud modem. Of course, you could only achieve a 9600-baud transfer rate if you yourself had a US Robotics modem and used the firm’s proprietary protocol. With such super hardware, we could soon unite the world—of course, we could only do it one caller at a time, since there was only one phone line and one modem hooked up. But our PC Board software had the capacity to host up to ten callers at once, if we bought nine more modems and phone lines!

The Next Steps

In addition to posting job opportunities, we began to put our various surveys online. Because of the limitations of technology, the surveys had to be plain ASCII text files, so it took a reasonable amount of effort to take one of the Microsoft Word documents and strip out all of the formatting and tables, using only tabs and returns. There were a number of message boards that were haphazardly used for discussions among members, but the slow speed of dial-up modems really limited what you could do with a BBS.

A hint of what was to come surfaced in 1994, when I began reading about this new company called Netscape that had developed a graphical interface for looking at World Wide Web pages. The Web had been around since 1999, but the promise of hypertext links between documents was limited by the text-only interface. Websites were still almost science fiction in 1994, but we realized that there was lots of potential.

By 1996, the infrastructure to have their own websites came within the grasp of small organizations such as NABE. A NABE member, Lu Cordova, had set up a website for her own company, and offered to host some pages for NABE. NABE President Mark Dadd, working for the original AT&T, had some of his staff draw up an initial 10-page website, which included an economics trivia game. Going forward, I would be maintaining the site, so I bought a book on HTML (the first of many) and we established our first presence on the Web.

Soon we realized that we would need our own separate site. We were disappointed to learn that the National Association of Bilingual Educators had registered NABE.org, which left us with the far less well-known extension of  “dot com.”  It took a couple of years with different Web hosting companies before we found our present home with ICG Link of Nashville, Tenn., where we’ve been since 1998. They did our first “professional” design for us that year. In 2000, we brought the design function in-house, with a small redesign in 2003. In 2006, we had our last full redesign, with liquid pages (that expand or contract depending on the size of your browser window) with a full CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layout that was compliant with Web standards.

From Atoms to Electrons

We also picked up the pace of moving from hard copies to the Web for various publications. One of the first publications to go online was Business Economics, which is somewhat ironic in that it is the only one that still goes out in hard copy. But we began putting PDF versions of the articles online in 1997. In 2002, we began putting Business Economics articles online as HTML. However, BE articles appear to be too long and too technical for comfortable online reading. The demand for them did not justify the cost, so we’ve moved back to PDF only for BE.

The surveys started going online in 1999, and have evolved in form a number of times. Back in 1999, the majority of our members were still on dial-up modems, so we tried various designs that minimized file size, especially in the use of graphics. As speed became less and less of an issue, the designs became graphically richer. (Last month, only 2.8 percent of the site’s visitors were using dial-up connections.) By 2000, we stopped mailing out the surveys, including only a hard-copy summary of them in NABE News.

We began putting NABE News online in June/July of 1997, as a PDF of the issue that arrived in the mail. Since that date, all issues of the newsletter are made available on the NABE Publications page. Then in January, 2003 NABE News went online only, which meant we could include color pictures (as many as we wanted) and no longer had to worry about having not enough material—or too much—to fill up the pages in an issue.

Multimedia

Our first podcast went online in January 2006. Since then, we’ve developed a catalog of 74 podcasts, which had well over 5,000 downloads in July alone. We began adding speaker slideshows from the Annual Meeting and Washington Policy Conference in 2000. In total, the website has grown from those initial 10 files to over 3,400 files, including HTML, PDFs, MP3s, and an occasional video.

In the past 12 months, there have been 508,172 visits to the website, with 3,585,984 total files being downloaded, of which 1,691,348 were either HTML or PDF pages. The total amount of data downloaded was 197 gigabytes. Good thing we aren’t still using 300-baud modems.

And Finally....

I didn't have to search through old backup tapes or disks to find these screenshots of how the website used to look. Instead, I took advantage of the Internet Wayback Machine (if you were a fan of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you will recognize the name.) It's official name is the Internet Archive, and is a repository of old webpages that attempt to capture how the Web used to look. If you would like to remember the good old days (1996 and 1997, for instance) it is worth a look.