Phantoms Of The Early Web
It only just suddenly occurred to me this morning while thinking about my blog restoration project where my first webpage must have been located, and although it would have pre-dated the Wayback Machine and so is lost to time I went on a little search journey to see if it were possible at least to know what I’d done with it.
Said page wouldn’t be relevant to my project here, because it almost certainly was not a blog. What I’d remembered was that at some point MindVox—the internet BBS I was a part of when I first got online in 1993—turned on personal webpages for members, likely sometime in 1994. What’s funny is that despite this being pre-Wayback, it’s there as of 1999, albeit only as a “file not found” error.
From there, I hit up Google where it appears in a March 1995 listserv post about internet censorship, which makes sense as this would have been during the fight against the Communications Decency Act.
What’s interesting here is that this reference notes that my CDA resources in fact previously had been at a different host, suggesting either that my first webpage was not at MindVox or that my page there might have been something else but then became where my CDA material went. The earliest reference to the page at wookie.net comes from another listserv post about the campaign from February 1995.
I did find two other interesting places the phantom.com address popped up: in the signature of a pretty pedantic message I’d posted to the COMMUNET mailing list in October 1994 (so we know it existed then, whatever was on it), and—of all incomprehensible things—on a page of The WELL Hosting Manual from 1996.
To my knowledge, no copies exist of whatever was on either my phantom.com or wookie.net webpages. At that point, I must have been on a PowerBook model of some kind, and so any copies would have been on 3.5-inch floppies that would have been thrown away long ago.
It’s still not clear to me what and where was my first blog. I’m still trying to determine for certain whether or not the early posts I’ve started bringing in from the year 2000 on geekforce.org were done manually or through early Blogger. If I was blogging prior to this, it’s long gone down my severly deficient autobiographical memory hole.