Webvision has now moved from its previous home at the University of Utah’s Moran Eye Center to our new home at the University of Pittsburgh! We have worked hard to ensure that the transition would be seamless to all users, worldwide who rely upon Webvision for teaching and education.
Webvision was one of the first, if not *the* first online textbook that generates somewhere around 1 million visits/year. Its actually difficult to go to a scientific vision meeting and not find material in someone’s presentation that has been taken from Webvision. Additionally, it is used by many, many instructors world-wide for education.
Helga Kolb started Webvision back in the early 1990’s along with Trish Goede who did the first html hand coding and served as the first webmaster of Webvision. Two other authors, Ralph Nelson and Eduardo Fernandez helped manage early content and moved the concept forward by encouraging other authors to contribute chapters. I (Bryan Jones) then took over managing Webvision in 2000, and has been maintaining, editing, and administrating Webvision ever since.
Webvision started out life being hosted on an SGI Indigo2 workstation with hand coded html optimized for the IRIX operating system. It then migrated to one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs running MacHTTP where it lived for a few years. With the advent of OS X, Webvision became much more stable and I stopped receiving emails notifying me that Webvision was down yet again. Webvision lived on that G3 iMac then migrated to a G4 Mac Mini generously provided by Robert Marc when a power surge killed the old G3 iMac and then to a G5 Power Mac I provided to better manage backups through Time Machine as well as facilitating off-site backups. In 2011 I migrated Webvision to a new WordPress platform running on a an Intel Mac Pro running OS X where it lived until Apple depreciated Apache in the OS, and I started running it on Synology servers. Now we have made the next big move in the history of Webvision, moving to a completely new institution at the University of Pittsburgh.
This is an exciting new time for Webvision as we have a number of new content chapters that will be coming in the next few months and if you have a good idea for a chapter you’d like to contribute, please reach out: bryan.jones@pitt.edu