History of The Diabetes Homepage

The Diabetes Homepage was born during the summer of 1994.  During that summer a few roommates of mine in Computer Engineering started talking about the World Wide Web. 

I had no idea what they were talking about so I headed to the Sparc lab in the college of science building to see the World Wide Web for myself.

 

I was amazed at the information available, but I was also frustrated at having to search through irrelevant links no matter the topic searched.  As a diabetic, I thought it would be interesting to put together a site with links to all of the diabetes resources on the web.

 

When it was launched, The Diabetes Homepage had about 50 categorized links to diabetes resources on the web.  It offered the first online support group for diabetics where users submitted their email addresses and those addresses were posted in sections based on how many years each person had had diabetes.  However, the most popular feature of the site was a game of chance called The Virtual Diabetic. 

 

The Virtual Diabetic starred Derwood the Diabetic, your typical eight year old kid, and it was your job to guide him through his “normal” day which usually involved encounters with aliens, large animals, and every now and then a super model. 

 

By 1997, the website was receiving over 4000 hits per day, the number of links had grown to 125 links, there were 3 Virtual Diabetic games, and over 500 people were registered in the diabetes email group.  On top of that success, it was featured in several internet magazines and was named as a Top 1000 site on the Web by Point Communications.

 

I stopped running the web site following graduation in 1997.  However, because of a few illegal copies of the site running on servers in Korea and China, the site was accessible until about 2002. 

 

Since the original version of The Diabetes Homepage “opted for early retirement,” I received inquiries about the site and requests for me to start running it again.  Well, now that the technology exists for me to run the site as I initially had wanted to run it in 1994, I’ve decided to re-launch it.

 

For those surfers who were with us at the beginning, Welcome Back!  For those surfers who are new to this site, Welcome to The Diabetes Homepage!  I hope the site simplifies your search for diabetes information.