Birth of the web on BBC Scotland

Jenny Rollo
BBC Scotland news

Jenny Rollo at the News Hub in BBC Scotland's Pacific Quay HQ

It's 1997. Google is still a research project run by a couple of Stanford PhD students.

The founders of Facebook are 13, probably swapping Tamagotchis and dreaming of owning a SNES.

However, in a dusty corner of a newsroom in Glasgow a new internet star is born. Well, maybe.

The BBC politics 1997 election site had been a success - so a site following the devolution referendum campaign seemed the next logical step.

This site would be BBC Scotland's first official online presence. So, naturally, the two most junior members of BBC Scotland's news operation were handpicked to run it.

The online team consisted of me - then a politics student at Glasgow University - and a young Irish researcher called Albert.

Neither of us was Scottish and neither of us was exactly a computer expert. So, we were sent to London for a crash course in HTML, tables, Photoshop and server management for idiots.

I looked up the site earlier this week to see how it had dated. The animated graphics, of which we were so proud, look rather gimmicky How it looked way back then

The computer we were given probably wouldn't be powerful enough to open a Word document now, but in a newsroom that was still using a network of museum piece green-screen terminals called Basys, we felt like we were at the precarious edge of technology.

The information technology guys certainly thought it was pretty precarious as we called them out yet again to fix our FTP software.

The one person who was delighted was the then head of news.

He e-mailed from an internet café somewhere on the Med to tell us that the site was looking much better than the site run by our colleagues in BBC Wales.

I looked up the site earlier this week to see how it had dated. The animated graphics, of which we were so proud, look rather gimmicky.

They don't make them like they used to - a Basys computer

I'm also not sure we'd run a series of grainy screen-grabs of Peter Snow in front of his swingometer as a news story now.

However, Brian Taylor is still the star of the show - his briefings read like an early dry run for his blog.

In the 10 years since then, BBC Scotland news website has moved from being a marginal service for the internet's early users to being at the centre of our news operation.

We now have more than 20 journalists based around Scotland, including a dedicated reporter at the Scottish Parliament.

It's no longer just about reading what's put in front of you - you can comment on Brian's blog, access audio and video, or even recommend this article to your friends on the networking or bookmarking site of your choice.

What will you be able to do in another 10 years' time? Maybe you should ask the nearest 13-year-old.