I Googled for the lyrics to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and up came [this ancient HTML document from the days of Web 2.0](https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/poetry/poems/meanGrinch.html).
I’ve noticed that Google will often point me to these very old, rudimentary webpages that are 20 years old or so, and often hosted at American universities like MIT.
So my question is, why do these websites exist in the first place, and why do they still exist?
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They are personal sites that belong (or used to) to students it seems. Why are they still there? Why not?
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Why are they rudimentary?
Designing a website nowadays is easy because there are a lot of high quality, free tools that do all of the actual work of web design for you. Back in the day that didn’t exist and you had to code the website in raw html. You were also coding in HTML 3 or 4, both of which are much more primitive than HTML 5, which is what is currently used.
Those rudimentary webpages are what the entire internet looked like back then – even on sites run by big companies since the tools to do better didn’t exist yet.
Why are they still up?
Web hosting was expensive back then. There were a few companies, like GeoCities, that offered free hosting, but those were businesses. They couldn’t afford to just keep your website up indefinitely so free accounts would have their pages periodically purged. I’m also pretty sure that most of those companies have just gone out of business, so very few of the websites that were hosted on them have survived.
Big universities, like MIT, also offered web hosting for their students and faculty. Some of them – notably MIT – just never purge their old hosted content. So the page that some freshman made back in 1995 on the lyrics for the Grinch is still going to be around.
I’ve noticed this too. The number one site for accessing the complete works of Shakespeare is also hosted on the MIT site. Been that way for decades and always wondered why.
The web (not the internet itself) was first created at CERN (a physics lab) as a very useful tool for sharing information, so it made sense that academic institutions would be early adopters because 1. they like sharing clever things they’ve learned 2. are full of geeks 3. have enough money to buy big servers
They often gave students a little bit of space (like a megabyte) to host their own webpages, presumably thinking PhD students would write something to do with their dissertations but of course were really just X-Files episode guides and REM fansites.
Why do they still exist? Because nobody has taken them down!
The first readily available and affordable web hosting was available to university students. And students often had the interest and time to build hobby websites. If universities don’t delete the old sites, they may just hang out there even after the student graduated.
I first learned web design because my university offered free web hosting space. I taught myself HTML and built a couple sites back in 1996 or so.
The internet started with several universities finding ways to share information with each other quickly. Everyone else started using it later but the frame work and development remained at univsities for a while, really until the dot com boom
Two reasons:
* Before the web got commercial it was developed and used mainly in academic circles by universities and research labs. So a lot of the oldest websites, discussion boards, email servers, personal pages (of students, professors) etc. are hosted at those places.
* Servers owned by companies will eventually be shut down when they are no longer profitable or the company itself goes out of business. Universities have no such urgency to remove old content, and with the minimum amount of funding (basically one underpaid grad student) such stuff can stay online forever.
Several things lined up in the early days of computing where it just made sense.
* Universities being at the forefront of science, meant they had alot of computer science researchers doing research on the bounds of computing. This meant they had the latest and greatest computers for the time.
* The internet was formed as a research in trying to understand the best ways to link multiple computers together. Eventually as this research grew, multiple universities worked together to try and test how far this idea could go.
* HTML is just a normal text file that is designed to be read and understood by a web browser. Text is ***CHEAP*** to store on a computer, even back when computers took up entire rooms. When compared to something like a single image, you can store thousands of lines of text and be far more information dense.
* Early day web hosting was far less difficult to manage as both the total users expected and complexity was far simpler. Serving 92kB of text to 100 people vs 4k video 500k users, are 2 completely different problems. Since the university would already have a webpage, and all of the infrastructure has already been paid for web hosting. It was basically free to offer a folder that people can place files into where they would be served to anyone on the internet.
As time has progressed, it has only become easier and cheaper to host those webpages due to moorses law. That $100k dollar server they started hosting on, could be replaced with a $30 raspberry pi and no one would be able to tell the difference.
2.0? That’s OG Web 1.0, baby, when you could still hand code HTML in Notepad, and you typically would because the markup codes were so basic, and WYSIWIG editors were crap. Universities were among the first public facing institutions to get on the Web, and because they have no commercial imperative to keep their sites modern, especially several layers below the home page, when old timey profs retire, the pages often just persist in perpetuity. (Source: old timey Web 1.0 webmaster in a large public institution)
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