Lens has been developing sites since 1994. The area old sites consists of the several sites that lens has developed since 1994. Unfortunately the Archiving comity hasn't been able to get their hands on all the electronic copies so some of them are just a scan of an old paper copy.

The first web site that Lens built was during an internship at Shell Research in Amsterdam (1994 - 1995). It wasn't his main assignment but eventually the Internet was all he was busy with. At that time it was just before Netscape had their release of the first commercial (but free) browser and the rest of the world never heard of the Internet, let alone the world wide web. The Internet was then the domain of Gopher and Veronica, apart of course from e-mail and ftp. Mosaic was just released and everybody who had access had a copy and was starting to use it. Being at a research facility at that time Lens had the privilege to be at the forefront of all this and thus got the opportunity to get high speed access and computers to work with. One of the board members wanted to have a nice surprise for the new president of the ' Fysisch Colloquium' (a group of physicists who got together to talk about their line of expertise: physics) at Shell Research. He had heard that Lens was very busy with the Internet so he asked to develop for him a site for the group. This site went online on the Shell Research Intranet just before Christmas time in 1994. Click on the image to the right to view an old copy of the site.

 

The second site that Lens built was more of a hobby project to get into a specialized area of the new and emerging world wide web: Internet Marketing. In order to have a nice theme and concept he made up the fake company called Webliner (like a ocean liner cruising the web). This concept he then worked out into a site which had links to books, article and cases studies about Internet Marketing. This site went online in the beginning of the summer of 1995 at his then current weblocation www.hacktic.nl/~malens. This address doesn't work any more but we still have a copy here (or click on the illustration on the right).

 

 

At the end of the summer of 1996 Lens had the chance to get a job as an Internet Specialist at Samsom Bedrijfs Informatie (Currently just called Samsom), a business unit Kluwer, the Dutch Publish company specializing in BtoB information. During that time he deveopled several sites of which two went online.

The first web site for Samsom was the site for ' Assurantie Magazine', a magazine for the Insurance market. It was to be the first site of the magazine whos editors at that moment were still hesitant towards the Internet. This was Lens' first encounter with the people aspect of Internet projects. In the end they loved the website and really started to use it. Nice feature for that time was that the site had daily refreshed news. This was done buy a C script which as running on a server somewhere, and converted the WordPerfect file with the news and published it online.The first version went up around autumn 1996. Just click the illustration to see an old copy.