One of the projects I was most proud of at NASA was the posting of images of the comet Shoemaker-Levy the week of July 16-24, 1994.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/sl9/

At this point in time, the web was about 15 months old, and web pages were static pages with tiny images a little smaller than a business card on screen.

We set up a series of UNIX HTTP servers with the static web page content, and then a whole phalanx of 15(?) back-end machines that held the images. In the static HTML page was a randomizer that selected a number from 1-15, and pulled the images from that back-end server with that ID.

This was the first time anyone had done distributed load balancing for a web site. Prior to this, all web sites - static page content, images, everything - were delivered within the same HTML page, and were all downloaded from the same server.

Image load times got pretty slow, when people were hammering the servers looking for the images as they came back from various satellites and telescopes... but it never went down.

And throughout that week, we iterated on those back end scripts, and pretty much defined the "dynamic web page". I went around to various places speaking on how we did it, showing the code, and helping other organizations and people build similar dynamism into their web pages.

Pretty groovy to see where we have come from there, and how the JWST images are so thrilling and being shared amongst even the non-space-nerd community!!