Dan Raymer’s website has been a true pioneer in the use of the internet to bring technical content and more to the aerospace community, with special focus on aircraft conceptual design. On this website you’ll find information about design short courses, the RDSwin aircraft design software, books of interest to designers including those written by Raymer, aerospace abbreviations, a technical report format, links to other aerospace sites, conceptual design layouts, Raymer’s advice to young engineers, wanna-be engineers, and inventors, and much more. The site is free, no registration is required, so enjoy!
Raymer’s website has been up since 1994, making it one of the very first aerospace-oriented websites in history. As described in his memoirs, Dan Raymer was working at RAND Corporation in the early 90’s where he used ARPANET, one of the earliest internet-like systems. This was followed by Gopher, then MOSAIC, the first really-usable web browser. “Domain Names” became a thing, and Raymer grabbed www.AircraftDesign.com before most people had even heard of the “internet” or the “world-wide web.”
The only way to make a website back then was through hard-coded HTML. Raymer taught himself the language, then loaded his new website onto Network Solutions which was then about the only available hosting site with full services including domain name hosting. For a good laugh, use the Wayback Machine to see how it looked on 29 Oct 1996, the earliest archiving.
For over 30 years Raymer has improved and maintained this website himself, using HTML. In recent years, an ever-increasing barrage of email from website development companies have offered to update the site, saying things like, “your site is horrible, how could you be so stupid, let us experts fix it.” Well, it felt like that.
In response, this notice was placed in the source code: “Website programmed by Daniel P. Raymer the old fashioned way – HTML and a soldering iron. No, I don’t want someone to make it a “modern” website. Don’t ask, please.”
But the years went by, and hard-coded HTML could not compete with modern web development tools. Plus, HTML itself changed enough that portions of Raymer’s primordial code were threatened with nonsupport, and the old code looked terrible on cell phones. Raymer’s friends teased him. Even Raymer’s wife pestered him to update it, apparently embarrassed by its clunky retro look.
So in 2024, website developer Hand Design Co was brought in to turn www.AircraftDesign.com into a website worthy of its “Living in the Future” subject manner. Kudos to them, and I hope you like the new look.