O O Ø O O O O
The Good Old Days (circa 1996)
Kjell's recent exhumation of his old web page lead me to consider what I had previously posted for all to see. Fetching my backup from the security of a 3.5" floppy, I took a look at the eight pages it contained, the total of which constituted my first personal web page.
Each page presented a grisly short story, which I won't bother you with here, and a single third party quote. On the top and bottom of each page was a series of links, because that was what you did on a web page in 1996: you posted links to the sites you liked. Personal home pages were quite often just a collection of bookmarked links, and mine was hardly any different. These are the sites I checked every day, much like email. In total, they paint a fairly complete picture of my view of the World Wide Web in 1996.
I thought it would be interesting to look each of them up today to see who was still kicking, six years later. Here's what I found.
Suck.
<www.suck.com>
Suck is dead. Long live Suck.
The smartasses that brought us the fish, the barrel, and the smoking gun have moved on.
The smartasses that brought us the fish, the barrel, and the smoking gun have moved on. Why? The daily column was sold to Wired Media, who discovered an ingenious way to make one of the web's most popular and interesting commentaries into a money losing boondoggle. They cranked the operating costs on what was essentially a three-person operation, and pursued a new-economy business model to pay for it.
There's no longer any new content being produced, but they keep the site going and rerun the old stuff. Actually, that's quite a bit like the pd.o. We just re-work the same rants every week.
Dilbert
<www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/>
Much to my surprise, this link continues, totally unchanged. Way to go, Scott Adams!
I no longer read the strip, but I do find his occasional commentary in the Dogbert New Ruling Class newsletter to be very human, and mildly amusing.
ESPN
<espnet.sportszone.com>
Even back then ESPN never really had a normal URL to link. You could always type in espn.com and get to the site you intend, but they always mapped the URL to the flavour-de-jour. Nowadays the URL becomes a dog's breakfast of Disney's abortive go.com and Microsoft's soon to be aborted MSN, in the form of msn.espn.go.com. Nice URL.
Same content, more ads. Fantasy Hockey is my life.
Stocks
<qs.secapl.com/cgi-bin/qs?tick=t.arc+c.br+t.dlc>
This was cute. I was only ever one click away from seeing the latest market prices for the three stocks in my RRSP: Archer Resources, Big Rock, and TELUS. Let's run down that list.
- Archer Resources missed their exit rate in 1994, sending the company into a tailspin from which it never recovered, but not before I wisely divested of my shares, making around 150%. To date, this is probably my only really shrewd investment decision. I think I speculated in their shares for a few months in 1996, which would explain why I had them on my ticker. Archer was bought by Virginia's Dominion in 1998.
- I bought Big Rock at $12, and sold them just this past February for around $4, after holding them for around eight years. They're Canada's fourth largest brewery, and I still firmly believe the stock will eventually bounce back, now that they've paid down the debt on their new brewery.
- TELUS merged with BCTel and moved their head office to Burnaby. After that, I lost all interest. I only invest in Alberta companies.
The stock link? Long gone.
Newswire
<www.newswire.ca>
I wonder why I cared so much about news releases. Maybe I was day trading.
Inktomi
<inktomi.berkeley.edu>
The crew that developed the Inktomi search engine were spun off as their own start up, with the mission to market their technology to other big name search engine companies. They signed a few big deals, then I lost track of them during the bubble years.
They are now the Inktomi Corporation, which “provides network infrastructure software solutions essential to global enterprises and service providers”
I think that means they wrote a search engine once.
Deja News
<www.dejanews.com/forms/dnq.html>
We all know what happened to Deja News: Bought and retooled by the good folks at Google, amid cries of great protest. When they took the database of postings offline, webheads moaned “Usenet belongs to the whole Internet community” and similar rubbish. God, I hate it when people use the word community like that.
Rending of clothing aside, Deja News is now Google Groups. It's all good.
TUCOWS
<tucows.niia.net/software.html>
That's The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software, from when I cared about such things, and Windows 3.x needed an external TCP/IP socket application.
A few years ago the TUCOWS people sold the site to C|Net's Download.com and began redirecting all traffic to them. Today however, TUCOWS appears to have risen from complete obscurity to the only relative obscurity of “an Internet channel management company providing wholesale digital products to Internet service providers and web hosting companies on a global basis.”
From their press release, I take global to mean Toronto, ON, Flint, MI and King of Prussia, PN.
Hutt River Province Principality
<www.net-quest.OntheNet.com.au/Hutt/>
The world needs more people like the independent-minded former West Australian ranchers that brought us this completely separate nation deep in the outback. Yep, they separated from Australia using an obscure escape clause in their constitution. That was in 1970 and they're still around, although their international recognition is quite paltry. (They lack a U.N. representative.) The antipodean powers that be leave them alone.
You can buy Hutt River Province Principality stamps from their new web site.
Hell
<http://www.atlantic-records.com/gallery/tie/the.html>
I had no idea what this link might have been. Atlantic Records? Hell? I was stuck, and was about to plea to the Internet community for help, when I had the insight to consult the Way Back Machine. Presto! I was instantly transported back to the 20th century world of “still and moving pictures of Ari Marcopoulis.”
I think I linked to this site because I liked his treatment of his image map, which was fairly sophisticated at the time. It was also mildly creepy and obscure, so who wouldn't like it?
The utility of the Way Back Machine makes you think though: everything you post on the web never really goes away. It might make you think twice about posting that seething white-rage rant. Good thing we've never had any regrets about anything we've posted on the pd.o.
High Five
<www.highfive.com>
High Five was the site of David Siegel, the bad dog who taught all of us how to become HTML terrorists, thereby consigning the World Wide Web to an eternity of badly structured, pixel-specific hacks.
We've since repented of our errant ways, and Mr. Siegel has repudiated web terrorism for some strange thing called “Siegel Vision”.
If you can tell me what Siegel Vision does, please email me.
If you can tell me what it is, and what it does, please email me.
Illusions
<www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~kc2z/illusions.parable.html>
This was someone's personal home page, on which they had posted the text from the beginning of Richard Bach's Illusions, one of my all time favourite books.
As is so often the case with URLs from universities, this one is now defunct, but I have found the parable in question at another university-hosted web page. (Thereby insuring I will have to change this link some time in the future. What's more likely is I will post a copy of the excerpt on Pint Day.)
Sun, Moon, Star
<www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~eds/sms.html>
This was a link to a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's child-oriented Christmas story Sun, Moon, Star illustrated by Ivan Chermayeff, and published to web by Eric Scheur. This version was hosted on another university web account, which has naturally expired. (No one believed in contiguous URL-space then, so why should anyone believe in it now?)
The original site was undoubtedly taken down because it infringed on copyright. I can't seem to find any new sites willing to transgress in the same manner, but I found copies of the pictures on this Slavic site.
Mike Scott
<http://www.emirec.com/mikescott/>
Mr. Scott is the former and once-again leader of the Waterboys. For my money, he's the greatest singer and songwriter ever to have come out of Great Britain. His songs have an amazing spiritual presence, but he is not a “Christian Rocker” as some sources seem to indicate. (How could anyone who wrote The Return Of Pan and Glastonbury Song still be in the running as a Christian?)
His new web site is at mikescottwaterboys.com, but the user interface is almost unworkable, so I never visit. And please beware: never make the mistake of just typing in waterboys.com on a public web terminal. (Hint: Nasty, filthy, dirty pr0n.)
Harry Browne
<http://www.rahul.net:80/browne/>
I owe my isolationist, pragmatic world view to Harry Browne (by way of my father), author of How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, of which you've no doubt heard mention in this space before.
Mr. Browne ran as the Libertarian candidate for President of the United States in 1996, and again in 2000. His results were below expectations in both, proving people in general and Americans in particular want nothing to do with real freedom.
His web site is a hive of pro-Libertarian rhetoric, with a tighter URL to boot.
Results
Only five of 15 links survived unbroken, which is a fairly lousy rate of continuity.
When a site disappears, it takes with it the contextual continuity of the sites that may link to it. Part of the problem is the temporary nature of university accounts and their corresponding web space. Similarly, people change web service providers, and companies get bought and change their business models, which can also lead to discontinuity of web space.
The solution however, is simple and cheap: redirect pages. The cost of considerate continuity is a is 300 byte permanent marker pointing visitors in the right direction, or explaining the movement of the material that was previously there.
“Hypocrite!” you cry. “You had a web page, and you took it down!” Well, almost. My page was never linked to anything, and it never had any visitors. I said previously, it was mostly a collection of bookmarks for my own benefit. Toward the end I did link it to my personal page on the old Ingenia West web site (home of the ur-Pint Day Page), so it did receive a few visitors, but after I left the company I lost access to that host, and the continuity was broken.
I feel awful, really I do. But at least all the links are back now, right?
To finally put an end to this meandering reminiscence of interest only to me (sorry), I will post one of the quotes I had on the old site, from David Siegel's campaign for Internet freedom:
“God made my body and if it is dirty, then the imperfection lies with the Manufacturer, not the product. Do not remove this tag under penalty of law.”
—Lenny Bruce
Evan Spence
Tuesday, February 26,
2002
PD
DXXXVI