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
Looks like they gave server space to “the MIT community.” Just keep following the breadcrumbs and you’ll see the owner of the page is an alumnus …
https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/ …
and here is the page instructing how to add stuff to the “students’ portal.”
https://stuff.mit.edu/people/
In the early days, server space was often part of the deal from your ISP, email provider, or college. It’s nice that they haven’t taken it down.
I wouldn’t call it Web 2.0 though. That came later.
I’m curious OP, what did you think Web 1.0 was?
MIT was a major node on the internet since long before there was an internet. MIT was one of the original nodes on Arpanet, which became the Internet. In fact, I still have a friend’s card from the early 80s when he was an undergrad at MIT and he had an email address long before most of the world had ever heard of email. His address was an Arpanet address.
As far as Web 2.0, that began in the early aughts as a term used to distinguish the web as it was transformed ( for the worse IMHO) by the advent of social media. It’s not an official designation, and most people would say we’re still in the Web 2.0 era. One would have to be mighty young to consider anything Web 2.0 as being “ancient”.
For the record, as I mentioned, MIT’s presence on the net predates even Web 1.0.
The internet started out with UCLA, the military and MIT. There weren’t private companies involved because there was no money in it. It was poor, smart geeky nerd shit.
Universities in the 90s had a combination of good bandwidth and plenty of storage space for stuff like this, they generally gave their students webspace to post things and while it was generally used for serious research and such, some was used for random stuff like this. Also, if anyone is going through and pruning random websites from their hosts it’s the geeky IT/CompSci people who posted a lot of it in the first place, so they’re less inclined to take it down especially since it prolly doesn’t get a ton of traffic and a website like that is not using much storage.
So, you can find a lot of stuff like this on American Universities because that was what the internet was like 20+ years ago, universities were the heart of it, and the folks who attended the universities are the ones who are running the IT departments so they’re more likely to hang onto their nostalgia.
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