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site has been very stable appearance-wise for the past few years. It took a long time to realize that all I wanted was a pleasant reading area and to present the information in as small a bandwidth as possible. Here are some of its previous incarnations. Some of the primary links work. None of the secondary ones do ... so this is not a navigation tool. It's just some junk that might be of interest to other website developers. Use the back button to return here.

From 05/30/96

This is how ebtx.com looked when it was first indexed by Lycos in March of 1996. I slaved away for several months and came up with this monstrosity. I had to do a little cosmetic work on it here in order for it to appear as I originally intended in the newer browsers (made for Netscape, i.e. before Internet Explorer was even contending for dominance. The only other option at that time was the other things that came before Netscape (Cello, Air_Mosaic, NCSA Mosaic) which I was using at the end of 1995).

Very amateur here. I made that sparking diamond thingy myself. Cool eh? Useless. I think this is when I began to realize that I had to go to a side frame for quick navigation purposes.

I still like the appearance of this incarnation. It's simple and pleasant to look at ... very clear. But ... it didn't have the side frame I needed. At that time I offered a compressed file for download. It was a lot of trouble to update so I gave that over quick.
Note my invention of the TOCBAR on the left side. This one is invisible. The purpose of a TOCBAR is to take you back to the Table of Contents at the top of a long (no frames) page without having to keep putting in a GO TO TOP gif file here and there. It also provided the margin on the side so that text didn't go too wide ... all the way across the page causing reading difficulties.

Here are two other examples of my TOCBAR invention. Yeah, my site used to be dark and had all different kinds of backgrounds with no relation to one another.
From 2/01/97 ... Nature of Man
Also from 2/01/97 (apparently switched one for the other that day)

This one gets rather complicated doesn't it? Three frames. Washed out and ... hmmmmm, what was I thinking? You see what happens when you work too much on a project. Your sense of good and crap gets muddled.