Since the 20th anniversary of Iowa Highway Ends and the 3000th post on this blog are converging, it’s convenient to look back a quarter-century…
The project cover includes representations of how sign styles changed over time (not as direct-descendant-of).
Created: July 19, 1996 at 3:54 PM
1. What was your goal?
My goal was to learn the history of Iowa’s roads and highways by county fair. [Ambitious much? — Ed.]
2. How did you go about working towards your goal?
Most of my information was from maps of Iowa and the Midwest. I got the maps from my house and my grandma’s house. I used a black-and-white copying machine first, and then later replaced those copies with a color scanner. I manipulated some of those images with Ofoto, the program used when scanning the images, and ColorIt!, a painting program. I then brought some of the images into the ClarisWorks (still another program) drawing section, and I added a key to them. My paper that accompanies the maps was written with ClarisWorks’ word processing section.
3. What were the most important things you learned as you worked towards your goal?
[list of things I learned about Iowa highways omitted]
4. What ideas or plans do you have for the future based on what you have learned or discovered?
I will put this information on the Internet with my homepage (computer project) and I will probably do some more research.
What homepage would that be, 1996 self?
This one, sort of, from the short time frame that making one was recognized as impressive (via PageSpinner):
[Remember Netscape? Remember Telnet? Remember clip art?]
Did you ever put that information on the Internet?
Oh, some of it, eventually, starting about five years after both my Self-Determined and Computer projects made State Fair.
For comparison of the time:
“News attracts most internet users,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 1996
The biggest and perhaps most significant change over the last year is the increased use of the World Wide Web. Nearly three-out-of-four (73%) report having used the Web, compared to only 21% in 1995. Web use appears to be frequent: 51% said they used the Web either yesterday or sometime in the past week vs. 12% last year.
Consider that what you see above is not that far off from being closer to the moon landing than the present day.