Visitors to Stanford Federal Credit Union's website last week got a glimpse at what passes for ancient history on the World Wide Web.
The credit union, which pioneered the world's first online banking service ahead of even the largest banks by more than a year, marked the 10th anniversary of its Internet banking service by redisplaying its original home page at www.sfcu.org. The page was first viewed on November 17, 1993.
"We knew the anniversary was coming up awhile ago, and we wanted to do something to mark the occasion," indicated Sam Tuohey, the vice president, Information Services, for SFCU. Tuohey and Marketing Vice President Margaret Wold were both working in the credit union's marketing department on the online and web projects in 1993.
"Margaret (now the VP Business Development) and her department conducts campaigns continually attract more users, but we wanted to do something special to acknowledge the member participation that brought this innovation about," Tuohey said. "So we got our hands on an old color printout of the original home page." Long-term SFCU employee Teri McMullen had retained the original artwork in digital form, and they put the page together.
Redisplaying the original page did require some modifications. Stanford Federal added links to some of its newer services, and included a link to the credit union's current page. The commemorative page also had link to a screen shot of SFCU's first version of CUOnline, which in 1993 was available through telnet.
Stanford Federal reported that the first month that the CUOnline banking service was available, members conducted a total of four inquiries and transactions. In 2003, members will use the CUOnline service more than one and a half-million times.
