Flutterby™! : I forgot my first 2006-01-03 07:57:05.877267+00

I forgot my first

2006-01-03 07:57:05.877267+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Dave linked to Jeremy Zawodny reminiscing about his first web server. Depending on how loosely you define "web", I remember running the gopher:// protocol with KA9Q with the help of Robert Wilson and a few other folks from the BBS crowd way way back. And, of course, there was Hyper!...

But the first HTTP server connected to the real-live Internet would have been NCSA HTTPd sometime in 1994 (I think, we didn't have a full-time feed 'til 94, right Meuon?), with the help of Aaron Spink. I'd guess it would have been on caladan.chattanooga.net, a 386/33, running some .9x or early 1.something Linux kernel. Might have even been on arrakis.chattanooga.net, a 386/25 with either 4 or 8 meg of RAM that served as the nameserver and which, for giggles, we got X running on...

It's amazing to think back to how much of what we predicted back then about information accessibility, personal publishing and the like not only came true, but was scoffed at at the time. But now... well... we had a power outage this last weekend, and I've got less than an hour of battery for the house server and routers, so I shut down the net. Then we started to make plans: "We should pull up a movie schedule", "we should look at a map", "we should check traffic"; all based on technology that most people couldn't even imagine a decade ago.

caladan was where I had my first website (http://caladan.chattanooga.net/~monequin). I kept it there and even had my first blog there until 2000 when I went from using COL to Bellsouth, then to comcast. I remember signing up for COL in January or Feb of 95. I always felt like I was doing something unique when I first signed onto the web. There weren't a few of us around town and now it's hard to believe how far we've gone.

whois arrakis@whois.arin.net still nets the answer: Arrakis is the name of the Autonomous System of AS3901, and of the first name server we built. Why? I think it was Aaron Spinks computer name, or maybe we just needed names and picked a Dune theme. I don't remember.

I just realized how odd it was that the current owner of COL never read, or would read: Dune. Sigh.

Dang it, I don't see any of the cool stuff we had from those early days at http://www.archive.org/ . I still remember my "but... but... you can't break the web, there might be inbound links to some of that!" reaction when tom kunesh decided to do some housecleaning circa '96 or so.

Is tpk still around? I know he had a radio show for a while but haven't heard about him in a long time.