My first professional job in IT was at Agrotel, in the 1990s.

Looking back at it now, it was a good moment to start working with
computers because the technology we were using was changing underneath
us. I started as a programmer in an environment that had been built
around Videotex, and during my time there the Internet and World Wide
Web were rapidly taking over.

Agrotel had been around before I joined. Its roots were in agricultural
electronic information services that predated the Web. Information was
distributed through Videotex, or VTX, allowing users to connect to
central services and retrieve pages of agricultural information
electronically.

By the time I was working there, however, it was obvious where things
were going.

The Internet was growing quickly and the Web provided a much better way
of distributing information. The problem was that there was already a
lot of useful information and data sitting in systems designed for the
old environment.

One of the things I worked on was software to automatically convert
information from the existing systems into HTML. One of my programs was
simply called DAT2HTML — a conversion program that took data
intended for the old information environment and generated webpages from
it.

Some of that program’s output has, somewhat accidentally, survived on my
website to this day.

There is an old test page in /grafiek/ whose original HTML title is
still “Agrotel Conversie programma DAT2HTML.” It generates a
graphical presentation of a series of values using HTML and tiny GIF
elements — very much the way these things were done before browsers
had SVG, Canvas, JavaScript charting libraries or any of the tools we’d
use for the same job today.

https://www.maartenmoerman.nl/grafiek/TEST.HTM

There is even an old WS_FTP.LOG sitting next to it. It shows the files
being transferred on 14 January 2004, first involving a backup under my
Windows profile and later being uploaded to /home/mgm/www/grafiek on
one of my machines.

The files themselves may be older — the log refers to them as coming
from a backup — so I don’t regard 2004 as the date I originally wrote
DAT2HTML. But it is a nice little timestamp that happened to survive
with the files.

https://www.maartenmoerman.nl/grafiek/WS_FTP.LOG

DAT2HTML is a good example of the sort of software I was writing at the
time. We already had information and data in systems built around an
earlier generation of online services, while the Web was becoming the
place where that information needed to be. Rather than manually
rebuilding everything as webpages, I wrote tools to automate as much of
that process as possible.

Looking at the output today is quite funny. Generating a graph using a
collection of tiny GIF files and HTML layout is obviously not how anyone
would approach the problem now. But browsers and HTML were considerably
more limited, and getting information from one system onto the Web often
meant simply inventing a practical way of doing it with what was
available.

The programming also brought me increasingly into contact with the
infrastructure underneath it. If we were going to provide these services
over the Internet, we needed the servers, connectivity, DNS, mail and
networking to actually run them.

So alongside writing software, I became involved in building an **ISP
environment**.

That was probably where my later career in network engineering really
started. I began as a programmer, but I found myself spending more and
more time with Unix systems, servers and networking.

I still have other remnants from those days online. There is, for
example, an old maarten.agroweb.nl Christmas page from 2000 sitting on
this domain, complete with my old @agroweb.nl email address.

It is a small surviving piece of a very different Internet.

Connections were slower, servers were physical machines you actually
knew, and if you wanted a service to exist there was a reasonable chance
you would end up configuring much of the infrastructure yourself.

Agrotel itself went through later organisational changes. One thing I do
want to make clear, because some online employment databases get this
wrong, is that I worked for Agrotel.

I did not work for the later Agroportal organisation. That came
afterwards.

After Agrotel my career moved further into Internet infrastructure. I
later worked at Solcon, where operating Internet infrastructure was
the actual business, and eventually moved almost entirely into network
engineering.

Years later I would be working on BGP, MPLS, data centres and network
automation for eBay and eBay Classifieds Group.

But a surprising amount of it started with trying to get agricultural
information out of an old information system and onto this new thing
called the World Wide Web.

At the time, of course, we didn’t think of it as Internet history.

It was just the new system we were building.