It’s always nice when you create an article that contains ‘Volume 1’ in the title, and then you vindicate yourself with a part 2, so it doesn’t forever live orphaned in the table of contents. Anyway, it looks like we’re approaching another 30-year milestone for the ol’ homepage business. Technically, it’ll be next week, but I suppose I should have some sort of Thanksgiving-themed article for then. I suppose I should do one this week too, since that holiday gets the business without a whole month in its honour. But truth be told, I don’t have much planned, so let’s look at some old links.

V4 - November 23, 1995

This version of The Dann Page was cosmetically similar to the one that came before, but it set up the format that would continue to this day… or at least for another year until the remnants could become entombed to this day.

A huge number of X-Men links were added as well as some subcategories for the Overpower card game and one of the artists. X-Files was big, so I branched out into that, as well as expanding some Barney Hate pages, games, and cell pictures. That last one does not fit in any way, shape or form, but I’ll see what remains in any case. Onwards we go but due to the sheer number of additional links, I will likely spend less time musing on things I can’t seem to find. I’m sure you understand. We’re all busy.

Ashley's Storm Page

Remember a few seconds ago when I said I wouldn't spend much time on dead links? Well, that's not going to change. The only thing of note is that it was hosted in a subdirectory off a General Electric supply website. That may seem odd these days, but aside from ISP and university hosts, if you found a place that could serve out HTML and you had access, then you better believe that people would utilise it.

Audacity's X-Men Home Page

Not much here, but there’s at least a mention on a Usenet feed from 1997. The author, who aggregates Marvel links, was dismayed at sites going offline. The fragile nature of the web is assumed now (even if the mantra insists that the Web is forever), but with only a few years under everyone’s belt, the concept that things could just ‘disappear’ wasn’t seen in the same light.

Cable's Home Page

Nothing. It does show up on the Wayback, but there’s only an error message starting in 1999. After that, it redirects to the Whitehouse.gov page. Not .COM! Many a highschooler found that out the hard way when doing legitimate school research back in the day.

Darren's Marvel Pages

It appears in the Usenet listings, but under a new URL of http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kimster/comics.html

Weirdly enough, Google's AI assistant seemed to pretend to know something about it, but of course was of little help beyond that. "Maybe it exists," it says.

Frank Pitt's Gambit Page

Looks like Frank graduated by the time the Wayback got around to browsing. His new site on Geocities was archived, but it’s all boring post-graduate stuff like ‘resumes’ and ‘learning’. I want info on Gambit!

But he was part of the Old Stones Society, so we’ll give him a pass.

The Gambit Page

Finally! We’ve got a hit on the Wayback at least. Sure, it’s little more than a bio about Gambit, but I was promised at least that in the previous link, so now I’m somewhat satisfied.

His portal is still archived too, but each page doesn’t have too much on it. But there are some links to his friend’s page, and while they’re much in the vein of “first site”, where you don’t have a whole lot to say but say it anyway, I find them charming.

It’s a strange feeling that I may have been the first person to see them in 25+ years, since once something’s hidden in the Wayback, only a fool like me tracking down old X-Men links would stumble upon them. I also noticed that these pages were active on their original URL all the way until 2019! That’s a tip knowing that my site here co-existed with theirs for a brief amount of time. It’s like knowing that mammoths and the early Egyptian empire shared a timeline at one point.

There's also an archived listing of all the student pages at Indiana State University, so some detective work might pull up something of interest. I love how the university took a hands-off approach to moderation. Simpler times.

The Jean Grey Page

We’re on a roll. The site moved, but the content is all there. There’s a fair amount of info on Jean Grey and all of her clones and reincarnations. I admit that the timeline confused me like no other, so it’s nice to have these sorts of pages to clarify things—more so back in the day when wikis weren’t going to spoon feed you. Found this tidbit too, where the Assocuated Press printed a notice about Cyclops and Jean Grey's wedding.

Amazingly enough, there don’t appear to be many broken images. This is made more impressive by the fact that he saved bandwidth by hotlinking many of the larger ones. And on a completely unrelated note, how did they get away the character of Psylocke? They don’t even have her facing the same direction at the rest of the cast. I know the target audience were 15-years-olds, but still…

JSE's Page O'Stuff

It won second place in the 1995 rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks Usenet contest for Marvel sites, but aside from giving me another URL to try, nothing remains.

Nightcrawler's Home Page

I had marked this as my favorite, but despite that, nothing remains.

The Dark Phoenix Home Page

Cheating a little, since this was part of the Jean Grey page, but when something exists, I’m going to still link to it. There may not be many more.

The Punisher Page

Nothing. Moving on...

The Rogue Page

The fact that I found this in the Wayback isn’t the main surprise. It’s that I found a version from 1996, when usually these only get archived in 1999, years after their debut. It’s also surprisingly complete given that it dropped off the face of the Earth soon after. Bonus points for the image map navigation. It’s a shame we don’t use those anymore.

The Speedball Page

Back in the 90s, no one cared about the Avengers. That’s just as well, since Speedball was rejected by the Avengers and ended up in the New Warriors, which was an X-Title. And X-Titles made money just by association.

I honestly only remember a vague mental image of his costume, so this site helps flesh out a little more information. No images though, as they’ve been lost. But what we lack in visuals, we make up for in Fan Fiction! Definitely check those out.

The Spider-Man Home Page

Uh, oh! A non-X-Men page. Luckily for us, there’s no trace of it.

Things We'd Like to See

This felt familiar, and I knew I had the .txt file lying around. I also apparently rehosted it prior when talking about Sidewinder’s page, one of the very first I stumbled across in my grand journey through the ‘net. It was originally hosted on an FTP site that had anonymous read access, so you could hotlink to files right in the browser. Since that’s a pain now, here’s the file.

The X-Mayhem Page

I’m taking an educated guess here, and assume that this page was run by Mike Mayhews, the comic book illustrator. If so, he does still have a page active, but it’s mainly a storefront for exclusive variants of his artwork. What was on the original page will forever be a mystery.

Fuzz World Overpower Page

I’m skipping over most of the OverPower links, since only one works, save for some commercial distributor site that isn’t worth mentioning. I was huge into the comic cards in the early 90s, but as they faded away, I was ready to embrace almost anything else in their wake. OverPower was a competitive card game of sorts, and those I never really understood well enough to get into. I’m still unsure how this whole things works, so maybe you can make heads or tales of it.

Vandal's X-Files Page

This was a fun find. It was archived under the original URL, which is always a treat. But it seems to encompass the anarchistic early web perfectly—made all the more interesting by the fact that he worked as a manager for a large defence corporation. I only mention that due to the large warez and cracks page in the Underground section of the menu.

Now the X-Files page is the only true reason I linked to it back in 1995, and it’s serviceable enough as a link repository, as were many sites at the time. One interesting titbit was this free speech page, which allegedly recounts how another fan page was shut down by the studio since they were waging a war on fan sites. Recently, it seems like there’s no shortage of censorship scares when it comes to online content, and I don’t want to discount them, whatever they may be this week. But the online community was ever vigilant about this, especially in the early years. You’ll often see plenty of disclaimers at the bottom of almost every page stating that the webmaster doesn’t own anything, and it’s all just out of fandom. Well, apparently that didn’t do much good, since the higher-ups did take action at one point.

Anyway, here’s the main page, which goes for a greyscale aesthetic. There are a few interesting pages to dive into.

Sherry's X-File Page

Another rabbit hole that I want to fully explore but lack the time to do so. This one is a personal web server hung off a university subdomain, but it’s remarkably complete. Well, almost complete. The X-Files page, which is the one we care about, is missing, but according to the placeholder, it’s again due to the studio’s cease and desist letters. What was going on at that time?

Instead, we’ll muse on the page as a whole. Spam was entering our lexicon, and I think for some reason, it didn’t get connected to e-mail right away but rather just the glut of things online—as if any of us knew the full extent of what was to come. I remember taking a photo of the contents of a can of Spam so I could get the film developed and then digitised via the Konica service, just so I could post an image on my site. I don’t think I ever did, but when future generations look through my physical photo album, they’ll see the glossy 3x5 and wonder what was going on in my head. Well, it was that.

Other than the header image, there are pages on cave exploration, general sci-fi, and crypto! Of course, it’s more along the lines of cryptography and online censorship, but being down in Oz, they got the brunt of that a lot earlier than the rest. There’s a bunch of hosted sub-sites for friends too, so it quickly spirals into a ton of content.

The X-files Multimedia Web Site

There seems to be a common thread with these X-Files links. None of them actually have a functioning fan site, but they encapsulate the essence of the early web to perfection. That truly was my goal in this series, so I’m happy to see it coming to fruition.

It’s also the second site in a row to have an ultrasound picture shared online, so happy 30th birthday to the guy and gal who show up in those grainy scans. Now, since we can’t get any X-Files goodness, what do we have? Well, a trip to Disney and another to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It appears that most of the photos have been retained, and there’s a nice tech page dedicated to the arduous task of getting images online at the time. Trust me, they had it easy compared to the Kodak film to 3.5" floppy exercise I used to do.

Barney Stories

We covered a few Barney pages last time, but this one is special since I still have many of the images found in the gallery here. In fact, the 1995 Coolpix page has many, if not most, of them rehosted right here. Classics.

There’s also an ASCII art archive, which I believe I also rehosted on the relevant page here, plus some stories, which I believe was the sole page originally linked too. After browsing some of the pages, the movement against Barney at the time was dubbed “The Jihad”, which of course is fully in line with the reckless abandonment of good taste at the time. It wasn’t even edgy, since that would imply that they thought someone might object. Eventually the site moved to jihad.net, and I don’t plan to visit that on my work laptop in order to see how things turned out.

The Official Channel One Home Page

In high school, we’d have homeroom midway through the morning. It was a chance to hear school announcements and co-exist with those in your home class, not that it had any bearing on who you actually had classes with, since most subjects were split into academic levels—colloquially dubbed the “smart” and “dumb” classes.

However, around 11:15, the TV in the back would come to life, and Channel 1 News would air and give us some current events and talking points. No one liked it, but there was a deal that you didn’t have to get to your next class until it was over, so anything that shaved precious minutes off learning was fine by us.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to include it in my links, let alone caption it with “This is going to be the coolest place on the Web.” I do remember it being somewhat ballsy, with reporters like Serena Altschul interviewing prisoners inside their cell, much to the protest of the prison guards.

Sim City 2000 Resource Page

The Sims series held a special place for me growing up. They perfectly bridges the gaps between games and education (sort of). I made it a goal to have each of the SimWhatevers, with SimEarth being ridiculously expensive. I didn’t pay for it, but it did take up a sizable slot in the birthday present allotment, and for an incomeless teen, that was almost as bad. The worst part was that the gameplay was underwhelming, and few in the series had much cohesion. SimTower was an entirely different game with the title slapped on at the last minute, and SimAnt was just insane in all the right ways.

SimCity 2K seemed to hit the right balance. It took the old DOS game and added enough to keep you invested, while also providing the dev tools so you could palette hack your way to a custom city—or at least add stuff so you didn’t have to deal with actually playing the game properly to acquire the cool stuff.

Archives: Matt's AWE Page | 1996 Copy

The Molecular Expressions Photo Gallery

Glad we’re ending on this, since it’s a holy grail of the old web. Not only is it still active, but it has the same design. Well, not the 90s design, but an early Y2K layout that’s persisted for over 22 years now. The URLs also have remained the same, so the gallery subpage can be viewed in the Wayback with its old design just as easily. It certainly helps the archive, since filenames quite literally haven’t changed in decades, so all the instances get to share the same robust resources.

There’s plenty to look through, even if most of the images are blotches of psychedelic colours, regardless of the source. I thought that I might have downloaded some of these, but I couldn’t find any evidence that I had done so.

It looks like the site has more or less remained dormant since 2015, but that’s still a good twenty-year run, and bonus points for letting the hosting persist even if the content isn’t actively being updated.

So, there we have it. My goal was to dig up remnants from the past, in part to revisit old haunts but also to perform some cultural archaeology that isn’t documented pretty much anywhere else. The original websites had an honesty that could only come from a belief that only a few passersby would stumble across the content. They ranged from anonymous fansites by Geocities webmasters (which was originally GeoPages, much to my surprise) to university accounts and small pages by Boomers back when they were younger than I am now. Both the latter seemed to have no problem using their full legal name and providing personal details up to and including baby photos. I suppose it could be akin to what Facebook became, still with the same boomers, but much later in life when they eventually replaced the WWII generation as the “old people”.

Part of me wants to continue the deep dive into the web of content, and a more realistic part knows I’ll never have the time. It feels like a shame that so much is hidden in an archive that otherwise couldn’t be reached without my archaic list of URLs that have a coinflip chance of leading to something worthwhile. Hopefully, through this series, I can give them a new lease on life. Who knows? Perhaps one of the original authors will google their name one day and find this article. If you do, please reach out. I’ve been toying with an interview series with people from the old web, and I’d love submissions.