The Wayback Machine

Oct 23rd, 1999 – menu with tiny icons, including my old Powerbook G3

A recent podcast on 99-Percent Invisible reminds me that there are archives of 'the OG internet' – an invitation to see if my old 'web 1.0' site is still out there. And it is!

In the late 1990's, BCS-Mac closed its offices (in Porter Square), ending my volunteer work as an activist and system administrator. Prior to that, most of my 'online time' was spent inside BCS-Mac's First Class bulletin board system. About the same time, HMI (my old employer) had some kind of partnership with MindSpring, and they gave me a complimentary account (still just $8.95/mo at the end). At HMI, we were developing a product called Web Workshop Pro (for kids to publish web pages), so this was also a place to test products and ideas.

In 2020, and without warning, Earthlink killed the mindspring.com domain. My web hosting account opened in 1998 – so it ran for over twenty years. After all that, my old site disappeared.

Thus, 2023 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my presence on the 'internets'. So very odd to be looking at these ancient graphics and these hand-coded pages that had been lost – odd in a good way.

Mar 7th, 2005 – Powerbook G4, Cinema Display, QuickCam, and Rio 800

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UPDATE (Mar 11th): John Gruber and Jason Kottke discuss anniversaries, the birth of blogging, and the Wayback Machine on The Talk Show. They even discuss suck.com, which is linked on my archived site.