The Rise and Fall of The West Channel

Oh, boy, tonight a long-forgotten tale from the early days of the Whirled Wide Web came bubbling up in my memory.

It’s worth a chuckle.

Websites first began being a thing around 1993, and my employer, West Publishing, started to take notice. They gave me the protocol docs for the first version of HTML, the markup language for the web, and told me to figure this newfangled thing out.

Enter the nemesis of developers everywhere: managers on airplanes.

Managers in the computer industry like to go to computer conventions and vendor trade shows in faraway, fun and exotic locales.

You know, like Anaheim, CA. Why Anaheim? I have a guess.

This involves travelling on airplanes, of course. And that means they have a lot of time on their hands while they’re in the air sipping on their Bloody Marys.

And so they pick up a computer industry magazine and start to read.

Saints preserve us.

One of my managers returned from such an excursion all excited. He’d just learned from a magazine artlcle about something called “Netscape Channels.”

Netscape Navigator was the web browser at the time, and they had opened up the ability for companies to create “channels” displaying their own curated content using DHTML, which enabled cool-looking animation.

Nobody knew what to think of the web at first; we were bewildered, it was all so brand new. But a “channel,” you know, sort of like a broadcast TV channel, that we could stake out as our very own?

That struck a chord. “The West Channel!” he exclaimed. “Yeah! Let’s do it!”

So I put together a proof of concept and showed it to an admiring semicircle of coworkers gathered around me.

“Oh, wow!” they all gushed in awe as a news article assembled before our astonished eyes from a headline, columns of text, and photos flying in from all directions. After a delay, the next news article would similarly appear.

“You know, I really don’t see how useful this is,” I observed. “All we’re doing is making the page take longer to load. You can’t read all this stuff while it’s flying around like that.”

Nobody cared about that. It just looked so cool…

So that was great. Now to find sources of information to put into the channel. We went, hat in hand, to talk to all the various divisions of the company.

None of them had any content they were willing to give away for free. “Are you mad?” was the prevailing sentiment.

The project thus languished for maybe a month when yet another manager rushed in from a flight back from yet another conference with a new edict.

He’d read in a magazine article that “Netscape Channels is not ready for prime time.” And so the project was axed.

My team was disappointed, but I summed it up this way: “Well, we got into this project for a dumb reason, but then we got out of it for a dumb reason, so it all balances out.”