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
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.
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