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?
In: 2187
I the early days of the internet webhosting and bandwidth could be very expensive so free webhosting sites were extremely popular.
Geocities and Angelfire were the most common platforms and a very significant portion of the practical internet was hosted on those two platforms.
Most of these sites were low quality HTML fan sites (even by the standards of the day), and fan generated content working within strict limits of how much content you could upload (sub 1 mb) and littered with constant pop up ads. The kind of content that you would find on Facebook or Wikipedia today.
Geocities went belly up in 2009 and that day a very significant chunk of the early internet went with it. There’s a few places that were able to save portions of it for posterity if you know where to look.
So what does this have to do with MIT?
Universities were key the development of the early internet. The Internet was originally used by the US military and then was adopted by higher learning institutions to share information. These were the organizations with enough budget and resources to build internet links and maintain servers in the earliest days of the web.
MIT offered free webhosting to students in the same vein as Geocities and it’s one of the few old parts of the early internet still online today. Students would use it to post info about their PhD studies or whatever, but also maintained your standard mix of fansites and social hubs.
MIT just copy + pastes the website code to new servers every once in while and the entire content is probably on a few Gigabytes so really nothing compared to what we have online today.
Other Universities have similar hoards of content online. A friend of mine maintains the website for our local University and the servers are full of decades worth of *junk* that just get copy+pasted to new servers every few years because no one can be bothered to go through it and judge what to keep and what to trash.
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