This article would have been timed much better had I released it last week. But one was almost finished, and I didn’t realize the timeliness of it until the actual day, so there was little chance I could pull it together in time, especially since it required a bit of legwork.

What on Earth am I talking about? What could be so momentous? Well, Aug 13 marked 30 years since my first website—one that was published online, in any case. I had one prior in July, which lived only on my hard drive. I also had one later in August, which broke out of my family’s shared website, so we’ll use those three examples for the foundation of this week’s article.

I have another plan for what to cover, but a little history/timeline can’t hurt. Based on some timestamps of files on my hard drive, I got access to the World Wide Web in late June of 1995. I had AOL briefly before that, but that was its own ecosystem. It was also pay-by-the-minute, even if you got a certain amount of free hours upfront. There was no shortage of floppy disks and CDs that offered endless perks, many of which took on a second life and were more often known as “beverage coasters.” Generally, I would log on in rapid succession in order to lock down a 9600 baud connection (so it would be fast) and check stocks, then log off. For some reason, I had some money in the market back then, but that came down to feeling like I had a stake in companies like Skybox, which produced the X-Men cards I so loved. I recall chatting a few times, but the clock was ticking, so that wasn’t common.

AOL aside, the Web brought new life to the online experience. Instead of the walled garden, you hopped from one page to the next, using the network of links to find new places. Much of what we do today is taken for granted, be it search engines, bookmarks, or the like. Visiting a site twice isn’t as much of an issue, but at the time, it felt like once you found a place to explore, you needed to retain a copy of it for future use. Old mindsets still remain in light of new developments, so quite often, I would print things off on my inkjet or, at the minimum, save the contents to my hard drive.

June 22, 1995, was the first example of saving an image. I’ve managed to retain that, and in case you were wondering, it was a page from the comic: Generation-X, of which I had a subscription. I wasn’t keeping up with the story arcs in the wake of Age of Apocalypse, so this formed the tail end of my X-Men fandom. That said, we’ll certainly be focusing on that quite a lot as we move forward.

On June 26, I seemed to have saved a webpage—as a WordPerfect document no less. My modern version can’t open it faithfully, but the basic text is there. Later in the first few weeks of July, I found out that websites (or home pages, as I called them) were not, in fact, online word processing documents—rather, they were built on code and could be saved natively as such. I’ll rehost these down the line but will probably wait until I can get a dedicated X-Men page online. Without graphics, they’re little more than a historical curiosity.

By July 16, I had edited one of the saved files and attempted to edit some of the HTML and realized that it was rather straightforward to modify and, later, create your own pages. This spurred some interest in doing just that.

Three days later, I had hacked apart the page and figured out how to include my own images and background, and more importantly, I had placed some links there to pages I had discovered, thus no longer needing to save them. I had a record, and once it went online, I was helping to become another link in the aptly named Web.

A month goes by, and my dad excitedly lets me know that we have a way to get OUR page online, where it could be visible to anyone else who has access to the Web. The concept of “our” became relevant since he intended to have everyone’s page exist within the same .htm file, and the table of contents would link to anchor tags deeper within the document. Granted, I want MY OWN page, but the thrill of being part of this new technology was too good to pass up for superficial teenage reasons.

By this point, I had amassed more links, which all still appeared to be X-Men related. It’s interesting to see my hobbies evolve and how the web really took over. Like I mentioned, old habits remained, and things I had created in class and with real-life friends often crept into these early pages.

This leads us to the page that just hit its 30th a few days ago and marks my first solo, online web page. I lobbied with my father that two separate .htm files took up no more space than a single one with combined content. I’m unsure why I had to make my case, but we were set to update to version 2.0 of the family page, and that was the time to settle the structure.

You see, there was no file upload at the time. Well, there was, but nothing we could take advantage of. Perhaps in future installments, I’ll go over the wonky telnet and reverse FTP scheme we had to employ, but for the time being, we use the trusty sneakernet.

Sneakernet was a term used by my old boss, and though I once thought perhaps he had made it up, I recently found out the other day that it was used in a 1995 book about ‘going digital,’ which was all about the emerging web, highlighting many of the same developments I was encountering at the time. Basically, Sneakernet is the process of physically walking files to a server on a storage medium (in this case a 3.5" floppy). Sneakers, rather than wires, facilitate the transfer. In this version, I branched out to anti-Barney websites and later would get into games.

Now, onto the purpose of all this not-so-brief exposition. I wondered what ever happened to all those early websites that formed my first memories of the web. Are they still around? Can they be found on the Wayback Machine? What did “true” web 1.0 sites actually look like without the neo-nostalgia goggles? That is what I hope to find out. And I also hope that after typing 1100 words, I don’t end up with a ton of unrecoverable pages.

V1 - July 19, 1995

The offline page only had 3 links. Well, four if you count the link to my Dad's first page. It was stored in C:\netscape\ourhp.htm, which is naturally the best place to house documents. Sadly, I don’t have a copy of this, but I imagine it isn’t too far off from what we ended up putting online. Either that, or it was a really rough prototype.

Sidewinder's Page for Gifted Youngsters

The one that started it all. Well, sort of. I have a copy of the Mutant Page saved a few days earlier, but I hadn’t linked to it just yet, so we’ll turn a blind eye for the moment. It’s a shame, since I believe this was one of the bigger pages. A reference to it now shows another Geocities-type page linking, so I assume it was a bigger site (by the standards of the time).

But fear not… Remember how I said I saved copies of the early pages? Well, I did just that. An unassuming file called X.htm (not to be confused with X.wp, which was the WordPerfect copy of The Mutant Page, and X.txt, which was an FAQ) was sitting in my X-Men folder, nestled between the Tickism page and the test site from which I performed my initial stab at editing HTML.

I’ve reuploaded what I still have here, including the home page and “things we’d like to see.”

Archives: Home Page (Text Only) | "things we’d like to see"

X-Men Graphics

Like the first, no trace of this one exists. I imagine it was the site I spent endless days downloading images from, though. Our internet connection was less than stable, and since the 14.4k modem wasn’t blazing fast compared to anything we would accept today, grabbing a 100k file would often lead to timeouts, and we would need to reconnect and start again. Only after several tries could I get them safely on my hard drive. While the site no longer exists, I do have the images and previously uploaded them to the Cards Page.

X-Men Sound

Batting a 0 with this first version, aren’t we? The Wayback Machine does list several pages, but I imagine those were only cataloged due to others still linking, and then the 302 redirect was enough to list them, despite not having any content to scrape.

BUT, like the others, I have several .wav files lying around that fit the date, right down to the day, so I can only assume those are from this page. I’ve archived them here, in case you want a few 5-second clips from the Animated Series.

gwav.zip (337k, for the bandwidth conscious)

V2 - August 13, 1995

Much more was added by the time the page hit the public. Pardon the USFSA logo in the background; that was a consequence of having the shared page for the time being. With the first few out of the way, we’ll move on to the next.

The Mutant Page

Hey, look! We found an archive. Granted, it’s not the 1995 version, but a few copies from 1998-1999 exist before it went offline around that time. A fair amount of the pages still exist too, so you can browse the menu a bit. I do, however, have a copy of the original, but it’s in an ancient WordPerfect format. Despite throwing tons of character errors, the bulk of the page is still visible. I’ve linked a few below, but the original has a reference to the KissyKissy Rogue page. Hubba hubba.

Archives: 1995 (Text Only) | 1998 | 1999 | 2000

Matthew Garrand's Wolverine Page

NOTHING! Not even a listing of broken pages that were later picked up by a web crawler. But fear not, I have something called Wolverin.htm from July 11, even though it appears to be just a plain text document. I likely thought you could turn things into web pages by changing the extension.

So, while I’d love to have copies of the image archive, I can only assume this Wolverine FAQ was from that site. You can’t prove me wrong, in any case.

Archives: The Wolverine FAQ

Andy Banks' X-Man Home Page

Nope, no record online or in my archives. However, even if his page is lost, his footprints are not. Andy Banks was part of a fanfic group called the X-Writers. He hosted some of them on his website for a time, but by 1997 the page was gone. X-Man (the AoA version of Cable) and Generation-X were his interests, so he certainly aligned with my tastes fairly well.

In addition to fanfic, he also ran a mailing list. Once again, the old way of doing things prevailed, and rather than have people come back to your site, you would garner e-mail addresses and push the content out to them. The concept of repeat visits was foreign for a while and took some time to catch on; hence, my puzzlement at pages with news updates—later becoming blogs. Spam hadn’t really become a thing yet, so this was a viable way to keep in contact with people and forge a reader base.

Archives: Mailing List Archive | X-Writers | (Gen-X) | (X-Man) | Usenet Discussion for X-Writers

Excalibur Home Page

Look, I’m not going to have something interesting to say about every site that has no trace.

The Artie and Leech Fan Club

Still nothing, except for a mention in a Usenet thread. Since we don’t have a page to go on, I’ll give some brief info on Artie and Leech from memory. Every so often, Marvel would try to introduce a new generation of mutant superheroes. The reasons were unclear, since the sliding timeline ensured that no one would ever age to a significant degree, but they insisted. Artie and Leech were a combo of a scientist’s son and a Morlock. They were featured in X-Factor, then the X-Terminators mini-series as it morphed into the New Mutants (before taking over X-Force), and then finally they sort of hung around during Generation-X. No idea what happened after since no one reads X-Men comics after the year 2000.

Asteroid M: The Magneto Home Page

You may have noticed that most of these pages end in a .edu TLD. The great majority of websites were hosted at colleges by students before ISPs began offering spaces, and of course, well before the glut of free hosts. This one is also hosted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, like Matthew Garrand. Perhaps they knew each other.

But, yeah. No record.

Anjuan's Storm Page

Ding, ding. We have a hit. This almost slipped under the radar, since I usually first search for the exact URL, and then I dig down a level if nothing comes up. I tried to bring up the main page, and it redirected to a new subdomain within the same server. The main page did indeed list a Storm page, but he used an imagemap. Those were fancy ways of having a large image with hotspots on it that acted in lieu of text links. It saved the trouble of cutting the image and reassembling it into a table. However, there were two ways of going about it. There was a client HTML tag version, but before that, you needed CGI-BIN or something on the server to handle the request. That was the case here, so the Wayback Machine wasn’t going to help.

A broad search within that listed a storm subdirectory, so I wasn’t locked out completely. By navigating directly there, I finally found the long-lost Storm page, which probably hasn’t been viewed in 29 years. He, again, used an image map for the menu but thankfully appended text links below that. We did have the foresight back then to allow fallbacks for new tech.

Archives: Home Page

Marty Blase's Uncanny X-Page

No site copies exist on the original URL, but the phantom links appear to be FAQs and lists. That was also common. Sites were an attempt to get information out there, so we didn’t have to resort to reading the back of the Marvel trading cards and bluff our way through the half-century of lore. Not that I ever did that, of course. He was also one of the editors for the X-Men FAQ, along with Kate Short, and Jane Griffin from the Artie and Leech fan page. (There were like 20 people on the internet back then)

Marty can be seen posting in the Usenet groups from time to time, answering questions about X-Men trivia. He’s also linked on another fanfic group called X-Verse, but he doesn’t appear to be one of the writers of this; however he did contribute to X-Writers. The link does present a new URL, which shows that he got his own domain after the college hosting stint. X-Page.com ran until about the year 2000 and apparently was handed over to another webmaster (remember that term?), Rama K. R. Gottumukkala. The original page also won a Usenet Award, coming in third for Comic Web Sites.

Archives: 1997 | 1998 | 1999/2000 | 1995 Rec.Arts.Comics.* Squiddy Awards | X-Leap Fanfic - Part 1 | X-Leap Fanfic - Part 2 | AoA FAQ - Part 1 | AoA FAQ - Part 2

X-men Quizzes

Nothing except for this mention in a Japanese Internet Yellow Pages, moving on.

X-men Animated Series Text

Another Marty Blasé page. By using the new x-page.com domain, I was able to find a part 2 to the Animated Series synopsis. Most of the pages on that site are around, even if none of the images made it. I know I had an X-Page banner image floating around my hard drive somewhere, but I can’t find it for the life of me.

Archives: X-Men Animated

IntroduXions

Yeah, another dud with nothing to go on.

X-men Home Page

Last link in V2, so I’m glad something survived. Not much, mind you, but a few of the character bio pages have working images. And by ‘a few’ I mean three. Kudos for calling the site a Home Page, because that lends a little more credence to the fact that I’ve been insisting that we all called them that back then.

Archives: Home Page |

V3 - August 27, 1995

Good news, there are only three more links left. I know you're growing tired of these trivial write-ups, so thankfully I didn’t have a whole lot of time to find new things to link to in the week interim. We’ve got what would eventually become the Anti-Barney page, which was of course just more links, but things would be split up in due time.

The Barney Fun Page

This is exciting news. Not only was this a fun time waster back in the day, but it’s STILL ACTIVE!!! Looks like it swapped hosts in the late 90s but has remained there ever since. I can’t believe CGI-BIN still works all this time later, but I guess the old tech just works.

This was a page where a blank outline of Barney the Dinosaur stood in front of you, and you could choose various weapons to harm him. It just overlaid 1-bit pixels on top, but they were cumulative. There was even a page of recent corpses, so you could see what others were doing. I can even see where I shot him 30 years ago, since I seem to have included the querystring in the URL. (It was an Uzi to the forehead.)

Archives: New Host

The Day of the Barney

This was a fun story about Barney using the children to kill their parents. Part I was a short intro, but then it expanded into a post-apocalyptic dystopia where girls were raped to create “Loved Ones” (human/dino hybrids) and boys were killed when they reached puberty, and their skin was used to make drums. By the end, it turned into a freedom fighter story.

I printed a copy out and forgot to see how long it was. I think I ended up using 50 sheets of my dad’s laser printer stock, so he wasn’t happy. I still have the printout in a filing cabinet, though. Pointless, since it’s all over the web, but since it, like the FAQs, was originally a Usenet creation, it never truly had a web home.

Archives: Part I - III

Ze sveedish chef

All hopes for a strong finish are not in the cards. I thought this might have just been a normal fan page, but after some digging, I found a reference to it and realized it was a translator. Translation was far from what it is today; in fact, it was generally terrible. But there were pages that featured pseudo-translation options that just did some basic search and replace. In this way, you could enter almost anything, and some sort of result would pop out. I recall another one being for technical jargon and Ebonics.

It’s sort of unnerving to think about the span of thirty years going by within the same medium. I suppose it’s not too much different than your hometown, which has some buildings that have been there since childhood, sometimes with the same business. Others have been torn down or built up several times since, or at the very least have had new ownership within the same shell. And maybe it’s not so different than the TV set, which used to play vastly different programming despite operating on the same channels.

I guess it’s just the main concept that we can dig up the old examples and have them live side by side with the new. Sure, there are reruns and the old store that hasn’t had a remodel in decades, but there’s something comforting about the fact that the thing I “coded” when I was 14 still renders on the screen just as it once did. Tech moves so fast that all the other analogies actually fit somewhat better. Operating systems, or worse, mobile platforms, seem to discard anything older than a few years, so more of that is lost to time than the web. Huge thanks to the Internet Archive for having the forethought to save copies of things and doing it at such an early stage.

That will do it for now. The next update in November added a TON more, so since this took about two days (on and off), I’m not looking forward to that. I already designated this as Volume 1, so I can’t really back out now without looking foolish.