They, and the associated aerogrammes, were the subject of our first webpages which have now been resurrected and can be seen for the first time in many years, after they were lost in a disastrous migration to a new host.
We started with argonet.co.uk as our ISP. The internet was only accessed via dial-up modem, free websites abounded and we started on Geocities, later bought by Yahoo. Geocities didn't want commercial activity, so we moved to Xoom.com, later bought by nbci.com
Around this time we decided to have our own domain name and host the website independently, and norvic-philatelics.co.uk was born. Unfortunately the downside of such a long address soon became apparent with people writing to norvic_philatelics.com, norvic_philatelics.co.uk and so on. When they used these addresses for PayPal payments we never received them! So we added the extra domain www.norphil.co.uk with all pages accessed from both URLs.
The other, personal collection, wing of the first website displayed results of research into the contemporary postal history of the countries of the former Soviet Union, which had become 15 new countries. We started with Belarus, with an even more primitive webpage:
Because of the very slow speed of internet access it was necessary to make pictures quite small. For the technically-savvy, the 'alt' code on these images included size-limiters on the images, and an indication of the file-size.
This was because many readers took advantage of the option to display pages without images (for faster loading), and the text "map 1k" would be shown, giving readers an idea of how long the page with images would take to load! Nowadays with fibre-internet and mobile 4G access, it is almost impossible to imagine that world. Think how lucky we are!<img style="width: 110px; height: 90px;" src="bel_images/belminmp.gif" alt="map 1k">
Many thanks to our customers, suppliers, blog readers & others who have contributed to our success, and a personal thanks to my partners, Val & John, for their patience!
