“What’s New” archaeology
jwz has, incredibly, resurrected home.mcom.com, the WWW site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, as it was circa Oct 1994.
Edmund Roche-Kelly was kind enough to get in touch and note this link – http://home.mcom.com/home/whatsnew/whats_new_0993.html:
September 3, 1993
IONA Technologies (whose product, Orbix, is the first full and complete implementation of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA) is now running a Web server.
An online pamphlet on the Church of the SubGenius is now available.
Guess who was responsible for those two ;)
I was, indeed, running the IONA web server — it was set up in June 1993, and ran Plexus, a HTTP server written in Perl. IONA’s server was somewhere around public web server number 70, world-wide.
The SubGenius pamphlet is still intact, btw, although at a more modern, “hyplan”-less URL these days. It’ll be 15 years old in 6 months… how time flies!
Paddy said,
March 31, 2008 @ 10:06 pm
Man oh man - that does bring me back. 15 yrs ago! Yikes! I hope you still have your Employee No. 1 badge just for those occasions when you bump into Annrai ;-)
ben said,
March 31, 2008 @ 10:53 pm
For ages, we kept the “original home page” up at iona … had to retrofit a “silver” coloured background after a while … and the Doctor Fun links stopped working …
nishad said,
March 31, 2008 @ 11:53 pm
I was looking at it and saw a real ghost-ship-from-the-past URL. Anyone remember akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ ???
Justin said,
April 1, 2008 @ 9:24 am
yeah, I remember that! I was wondering where the name came from, but http://akebono.stanford.edu/ has a little bit of history there nowadays — apparently he was a famous Hawaiian sumo wrestler. there you go.
The really horrifying thing about home.mcom.com is the simulated slowness. Watching those GIFs slowly solidify is even more painful now than it was back then ;)
David Malone said,
April 1, 2008 @ 3:18 pm
I like the way that the word “hyplan” has basically fallen completly out of use in favour of home page, because it is an interesting example of how words can be discarded. Here are the first few usenet posts mentioning hyplans. I wonder if there is a site that could be used to plot the frequency of “home page” and “hyplan” in usenet posts…