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
It’s because the coolest stuff went up first, and most people with internet access were in academia.
The Grinch song beats Twitter eight ways from Sunday.
Back in the day, you could not have even an email account if you did not have an address ending with .edu.
My first email account was in 1993, and it was pretty cutting edge for the university at the time.
Imagine going to a library and searching for a specific book. You will probably need help from the librarian (that’s Google). They point you to your specific book or a section in the library. So if you search for something specific they will point you to a trustworthy specific source (a single book) or if you search for something vague – to a whole section. That’s how Google works ELI5.
In this specific case, Google suggested the edu website (that’s how we call them) because it’s an authority source and it answers your query perfectly. Even if someone creates a website with modern design that answer your question perfectly as well, it won’t be as trustworthy and Google is less likely to show it in the search results.
Basically, the librarian (Google) takes into account hundreds of factors when they recommend a specific result. Authority, age of the website, links pointing to that website, content of the website, speed, mobile friendliness, and many more. That’s why these websites still appear. They answer your question as good as another website will but they are much more authoritative than newer ones.
Lyrics websites also are special as Google has difficulties with them, the search engines often consider them as filled with plagiarism (duplicate content from other websites).
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As someone who spent most of her life on the internet, most websites were extremely rudimentary in the late 90s and early 2000s. If you went to a website owned by a corporation (like CNN), you would get [this](https://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/31/workstress.sidebar.wmd/) or [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20000706200310/http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html) (from Amazon).
The majority of people who accessed the internet in 2000 were doing so via dial up internet. Something like only 6% of the world’s population had internet access in 2000 and in the United States, it was 44% of Americans with about 78% of them using their phone line.
56k a second tops if using an analog phone line and in the early 2000s, I was usually getting about 30kb. Websites had to be basic for most people to access them. A 50kb website would take 10-20 seconds to load so images were kept to a minimum.
This rudimentary style kept websites small and they never took up too much space. My website from 2002 was 1.67 megabytes and that includes a forum, roughly 45 pages, and 300 images. I didn’t have a computer at home at the time so I had it stored on 2 3.25 floppies and worked on it on school computers during lunch break.
But why are they still being hosted by universities?
Businesses that offered some sort of free hosting would often purge inactive websites and paid ones would purge as soon as you didn’t pay. They were businesses trying to make money and it’s expensive to host thousands of websites that weren’t being used.
Universities aren’t for profit so they didn’t need to purge for the sake of using that space to make money. Universities also have a much smaller population so the amount of websites being hosted on their servers is only a small fraction and websites back than were small. My 1.67 megabyte webpage only takes up 0.15% of a 1gb hard drive and by 2000 hard drives were about $10 per gigabyte and 1.67mb would of been huge by 1997-2000 standards.
TLDR: Slow internet brought basic websites that took up almost zero space on a server. Businesses purged due to financial reasons but universities didn’t. Now, in 2022, all those websites combined are probably only a fraction of a percent on a single harddrive so it’s pointless to purge by this point.
Places like MIT took pride in giving students and personnel freedom to express themselves, especially if that involved using technologies. But freedom was key. I was there in the 80s and one the lab servers had a publicly available folder for porn images. Actually two folders, “m” and “f” . M was mostly gay stuff, pretty hardcore , not just beautiful pics of naked men… it felt free and wild, it was a very stimulating environment…
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.
Even before all this…the internet was a result of a DARPA project to ensure that communications between military p, government, and educational institutions could continue in times of war and other disasters by distributing the hosts across the country. The first sites were .mil, .gov, and .edu in large majority. The hosts were Unix based, and communication occurred with telnet, ftp, and the like. Communication between the hosts was via modem, or, if you were lucky, dedicated T1 lines, ISDN, etc.
Later on, GUI and WYSIWYG became popular as the masses embraced the technology. With that came Netscape, explorer, etc, to display HTML-based information in a more aesthetically pleasing way than just a stream of ASCII characters in text form.
> 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.
LMAO that’s not “Web 2.0” at all. Tell us you’re under 25 without telling us.
These old websites are great. The URL works exactly like you’d expect, so you can just remove some off the end to get into higher directories.
I highly recommend dpolicar’s masterpiece, [Creation](https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/pictures/drawings/graphics/conjureBird.jpg)
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