![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lehserAs I await election results, I'm flashing back to the first time I watched election returns on the web, in 1994. I'm pretty sure it was the very first chance; DEC (remember them?) partnered with the California Secretary of State's office to pioneer putting up election results (governor, mostly, but also ballot propositions and Congressional seats) as soon as they came in. (I found a post-mortem article; I'd forgotten they had a gopher feed, too.) Sadly, the results generally derailed that kind of civic-minded innovation--it was the beginning of the Contract [preposition] America. I'm pretty sure we watched the Secretary of State who'd made the whole thing possible lose, and badly; we commented on it at the time. Made for some *really* depressing watching.
We were on a dialup out at the normal graduate student housing, but some newly-constructed on-campus apartments at UCSD had broadband. So we went over to a friend's place, and crowded into his 8x10 room. Refresh was *slow*, and you had to do it manually. Sometimes it bogged down so badly we had to restart Mosaic, and, repeatedly, the computer. (Once or twice, in frustration, we went to the TV, but soon returned.) Oh, and the site came down a couple months later; I suspect the server was repurposed. Or had been repurposed for that election, and was reclaimed. Either way, there's no actual evidence left.
The site was a map, and it showed the outlines of the counties, and filled them in. Counties with higher proportions had darker colors; more even splits were lighter. You could click an area to check the details (%precincts reporting, actual split of votes). That seems impossibly advanced for the time, but, on the other hand, it *felt* like an incredibly cool, slick interface. That year, Republican was blue, and Democratic was red. There were warm glows in San Francisco and L.A.; otherwise, we watched the rest of the state freeze to a forbidding blue.
But we kept wishing we had a web site that would let us see the rest of the country. Now, of course, we do. We've come a long way, baby.
We were on a dialup out at the normal graduate student housing, but some newly-constructed on-campus apartments at UCSD had broadband. So we went over to a friend's place, and crowded into his 8x10 room. Refresh was *slow*, and you had to do it manually. Sometimes it bogged down so badly we had to restart Mosaic, and, repeatedly, the computer. (Once or twice, in frustration, we went to the TV, but soon returned.) Oh, and the site came down a couple months later; I suspect the server was repurposed. Or had been repurposed for that election, and was reclaimed. Either way, there's no actual evidence left.
The site was a map, and it showed the outlines of the counties, and filled them in. Counties with higher proportions had darker colors; more even splits were lighter. You could click an area to check the details (%precincts reporting, actual split of votes). That seems impossibly advanced for the time, but, on the other hand, it *felt* like an incredibly cool, slick interface. That year, Republican was blue, and Democratic was red. There were warm glows in San Francisco and L.A.; otherwise, we watched the rest of the state freeze to a forbidding blue.
But we kept wishing we had a web site that would let us see the rest of the country. Now, of course, we do. We've come a long way, baby.
