1/623

Hi. There has not been too much nostalgia posting here lately (well actually not much at all, so there). Maybe last June? But who cares if I feel like dipping into my tech past, it’s there. It’s part of my journey. And it’s my blog, my domain.

Farther back, maybe a year ago, I recanted my web start experience, plugging a Mac SE/30 into the network jack at my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges, giving it a sub-sub-sub domain name of hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu, lighting up MacHTTP, and called it my first web server. That was December, 1993.

It was a Jay Hoffman post today that started my associative trail back to 1993, summarizing some links, thoughts on the web turning 30. That’s on that broad plateau of adulthood. Does the web seem like an adult or is it living an extended teen aged angst?

Back to Jay’s post…

This month the web turns thirty. Of course, the web has already turned thirty a few times before (thirty years since the web’s initial proposal, since the first browser, since the first webpage, etc.). But this month marks thirty years from when the web was first announced to the public; in a Usenet group by the web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee.

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/the-great-reckoning-comes-around-august-2021/

I can’t help but explore hyperlinks, so I ended up at the NPR story on the web at 30 where this nugget caught my eye:

And so, with the creation of a single web page, the World Wide Web was born. And it’s grown quite a bit since then. There were 10 websites by 1992, 3,000 websites by 1994 (after the W3 became public domain), and 2 million by the time the search engine Google made its debut in 1996.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/06/1025554426/a-look-back-at-the-very-first-website-ever-launched-30-years-later

Hold the train, Fran. There were only 3,000 websites by 1994. I planted my web stake in 1993! That was a pretty small web. The author did not cite the sources, but a quick google for number of web sites in 1993 got me right away to see a sign of the 623 club.

I have my proof that I was in there! See the self-archived web stats from my web server’s first month — the first serving was before lunch ended on December 6, 1993. From the machine name, I was likely testing from a mac in our office test area, maybe showing my Director (my office machine was topaz.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu) (why do I remember that arcane stuff?).

Woah, Neo. My little experiment put the MCLI web server as one of only 623 web serving machines in 1993.

But back to that source, MIT Researcher Matthew Gray. The source still lives as a humble web page Measuring the Growth of the Web June 1993 to June 1995.

That was a different web in December 1996, when 95.4% of web sites were not .com (that included me!)

Gray’s research made use of something called “ZONE” a “DNS Walker” and other old stat stats collected by the Merit Computer Network Backbone Statistics. Merit was a university coordinated network set up for mainframes in the 1960s originally connecting public university researchers at Michigan State University (MSU), the University of Michigan (U-M), and Wayne State University (WSU) (thanks Wikipedia).

There’s some real humanity in Gray’s reports, from the later version explanation of terminology an explanation of hostnames include:

When you use a hostname, it gets looked up on a machine called a name server. Bascially, you give it a hostname and it tells you an IP address. Usually, a given hostname will always give you the same IP address back. This process of getting an IP address for a hostname is called name resolution. Often, however, multiple hostnames will end up giving back the same IP address. For example, the hostnames ‘www.mit.edu’ and ‘anxiety-closet.mit.edu’ will resolve to the same IP address, and hence, the same machine.

https://stuff.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/terminology.html

Wait a minute, what kind of rigorous example is anxiety-closet.mit.edu? It’s not a working domain, but once it was (thanks Wayback Machine, AGAIN?) a student organization’s web server. Be careful, I started slipping down a huge hole of Personal Home Pages (hundreds), things like black text, blue links on plain white pages with stuff like “For DCDS people, this page may be of interest. It includes the Unofficial Homepage of the DCDS Quiz Bowl Team, a flow chart of organic isomers, and my World Literature Project on Dante’s Inferno.”

I have completely digressed.

So I can’t help but have my own bit of pride and having been fortunate to have a job then where I could experiment and be one of the first 623 web sites.

Again, for context, I was most interested in both creating and helping educators navigate a connected, distributed system of resources… via Gopher. Ooops. And this was driven by a desire in a large, multi-college system that was split in terms of computer systems (Apple and Microsoft) that the internet seemed to be a means to bridge.

And not to be all glory, rah rah about the web. But there is a people story here.

I did not get to that place of putting up a web server on December 6, 1993 just on my own. I’m still not quite sure what my Director at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, Naomi Story, saw in the relatively green Geology graduate student who applied for a job there in 1992. That kind of supportive, involved, but hands off leadership seems almost quaint.

The real key was a gentle, quiet mentor named Jim Walters, who previously had worked in the predecessor of my office, and actually it was a job description of Instructional Technologist originally crafted for Jim that became a role I got elevated into. Jim was then working at Phoenix College, where I attended a faculty showcase event in October 1993. In his way, not being preachy or fawning over a technology, but literally handing me a floppy disk with word “Mosaic” hand written on the label, and just saying, “Try this Alan, you might find it interesting.”

That. Changed. Everything.

Because, while I had seen a text based interface of the web earlier in the year, navigating the connected set of documents from a physics lab in Switzerland, had not really lit the fires. It was seeing the web in a visual interface, with media, that was hyperlinked that made all the difference.

I could go on. But putting that 1/623 stake into the young web was by no means just me. So thanks to all those colleagues I worked with 14 years at Maricopa, those extended educators and technical geeks I connected with via the internet/web, and maybe just the general drift of positive serendipity that leads to this time, place.

Thanks, universe.

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