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
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.
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