[Cthulhu_]

You guys are using Javascript?

I jest; our first geocities page was just HTML with maybe a visitor counter, marquee and whatnot.

Our first PHP application / project in school actually didn't use JS yet, it used frames for a static menu and header and just straight form submission to get data to the back-end. Those were the days.

But when I did my first college level internship (1 year of internships is part of college education over here), it was Java back-end, JSX templates for the presentation part, and it was enriched with PrototypeJS for things like dialogs and an animated accordeon (back when animation was still "update the height of this element a couple times a second").

My first job involved using a lot of JS to still enhance a page; add to cart, image carousels, that kinda thing. jQuery era.

And my next job involved building a user interface for customer support staff to look into SAP or something like that, poorly built in BackboneJS.

The next assignment was once again using BackboneJS to rebuild the investment banking front-end for customers. That was - as with most applications I've built btw - a great use case for single-page applications (as they were called then). No SEO needed, fast enough to render purely front-end, API heavy (that was also the time when people realized you could build one API for both web and mobile), etc.

[ttfkam]

You guys used PHP? I started out with include directives with Apache, *.shtml files, and cgi-bin. SEO didn't even exist yet. You were either in the Yahoo! registry or you weren't. You just put your website URL at the bottom of the printed glossy brochures at the trade shows. "Mobile" wasn't a thing. Almost no one had any kind of cell phone. Pagers were still common. PalmPilots were brand spankin' new, a few hundred dollars (not including the 14.4kbps modem), and did not have web browsers.

(I'm not gonna claim things were better back then.)