Thanks, Wayback Machine

This is probably one of the oddest things I’ve ever encountered on the Internet: Internet fossils.

It starts first with the Wayback Machine, (their inspiration may be found here) this handy little web archiving service that, for some terrible reason, is backing up and preserving for posterity every durn fool thing that’s ever been put up on the Internet. Which is a fine, glorious thing to do, because who knows, in the distant future, if people will want to know what the World Wide Web looked like in its birth, when people were putting up crap without all the flash (and Flash) and color and, well, debonair and urbane sophistication with which we handle the Internet today?

So, folks, witness a few fossils from my own Internet past. Yes, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I discovered today a plethora (Yes, Jeffe, I know what it is to have a plethora) of pages I created while a student at the University of Idaho way back in the ancient year of 1996. Yes, the web pages you’re about to see are fourteen years old. Please handle with care. They’re brittle with age, especially the photo gallery, which already has many broken links.

First of all, my “index” page. How quaint. An index page. Yes, this was back when we had to hand-craft our pages using HTML chiseled from papyrus and then wrapped in a bollock’s hide and stored under a water fall for three weeks. This page, folks, was last updated Dec. 21, 1996. I graduated in May of 1997. I’m not sure why I never went back to revise or add to the pages after I left school. Probably because I was a complete idiot at HTML and had no idea how to get back to these pages once I didn’t have access to University of Idaho computers.

So witness what you missed when you didn’t know me back then. My index page starts out like this:

(Yes, I was, and still am, a Secret of NIMH freak.)

And you bet your boots there’s more.

My Complete and Utterly Cool NIMH home page.

My page dedicated to sagebrush.

My ‘personal’ page, containing book reviews.

More book reviews.

A page for the book and film Watership Down (I was and remain a complete anthropomorphist and geek).

Another for the movie Babe (yes, the talking pig one).

Columns I wrote for the student newspaper.

And, finally, an essay I wrote in an English class that won me a 1996 University of Idaho Banks Award. As you can see, we were pretty good about bragging up our accomplishments on the net, even way back then.

So, even though I didn’t start this current blog until late 2007, I now have proof that I have indeed had a web presence since 1996. Fourteen years, baby. I feel sooooo very important right now.