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| The Information Superhighway is RAD! |
The web has been around now for almost 20 years for most people. Wikipedia states that the WWW "started" when Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. But, I was around back then, you know.
Only major corporations and universities would have had access to the web when it first debuted. Heck, even access to newsgroups was pretty rare for most common folks until the much hulla-ballooed commencement of "Eternal September" (i.e. after September 1993 when AOL opened up Usenet access to its decidedly netiquette-oblivious, techno-noob subscribers). It was several months later that AOL opened up a mirrored version of the Web to users and then only in slow increments would they open up the entire web directly, after much competition from then start up ISPs like Earthlink and AT&T Worldnet.
The Web, by its very nature, is ever-changing, ever-evolving and ever-growing. The Web as we know it today is a very different animal in many ways than it was in the '90s. So, as an avid history buff, it got me thinking...
Are there any remnant websites still around that were created in those early days and, like Peter Pan (or perhaps Sleeping Beauty would be a better metaphor?) are frozen in time, never having been developed beyond then? Thus is the focus of Cyber Archaeology...finding those lost sites long buried before the Internet Boom and Bust of 2000, the implementation of Web 2.0 and the dawning of the Age of Social Media.
It turns out I'm not the only CA out there. Like the priests in the movie "The Fifth Element", there are many people who solemnly devote countless volunteer hours to capturing and saving the remains of the early Web for study by the present and future multitudes with a passion for learning (or in my generation's case: relearning) what the Web experience was like decades ago. Back in the days when it could very well have just turned into a passing fad, kind off like the late '80s/early '90s precursor for inter-computer communication and exchange, the BBS.
In fact, I'm just surmising, the BBS example is precisely what we Cyber Archaeologists hope to avoid. After the emergence of the public availability of the Internet, BBS use dropped precipitously. Today there are fewer than 30 die-hard, likely home-based enthusiasts still running dial-up BBS boards. But they're an endangered species. Once these likely middle-aged nostalgia buffs grow too old, their kids and grand kids will turn off their dusty, wheezing 386's forever without a second thought.
One of the great repositories, and subsequently, great research tools of the Cyber Archaeologist is, of course, the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. Here, all manner of sites, big and small, personal and commercial are archived. Want to see what the first McDonald's website looked like? Or how about musicians and entertainers from the nineties? Oh, the fuchsia and neon green! The twinkling animated GIFs. The auto-play midi music.
Another project, which I'm currently accessing for my own research, is Reocities (and other sites like it). Here, fast-acting good-hearted preservers of cyber history, cached thousands upon thousands of Geocities websites before Geocities' owner, Yahoo, shut it down in 2009. All those free personal web sites.
Who among us back then DIDN'T have a Geocities web page? It was like a rite of passage. In fact, my current endeavor is to find my own personal web site I created and maintained in the mid to late nineties. It has a lot of information I'd find absolutely fascinating to see once again after all these years. I worry though that I may have deleted the site before the capture. If so, it may be lost forever.
But, on the odd chance that somehow it had been cached before that, or, perhaps on the chance that my memory fails me and I didn't delete it, I hope to find its lonely remains. Futily flashing its simplistic, yet tacky animated icons to no human eyes, all this time.
