PART 1: THE INEVITABLE PASSAGE of time makes reconstructing an accurate picture of the Web's early days very difficult. Old and venerable sites disappear, and obsolete link lists so predictably yield a dismal skein of 404 Messages that even the most optimistic site researcher is tempted to simply throw her hands up in despair, and loudly bewail the fact that so little remains of the early Web.
This despair is, however, tempered by the fact that a few isolated clusters of miraculously primodial Web content still survive, not in a Hypermedia Museum display case, but on the very same servers upon which they were laboriously constructed back in 1994 or 1995. These old sites often owe their existence less to active preservation efforts than to the same form of benign neglect that lets unused files accumulate on a hard drive without regard to the fact that no application has further use for them.
In this inaugural issue of The Lost Web, Amateur Webleologist Steve Baldwin examines some early surviving Web experiments sighted on a recent tour of major university servers. Like primitive insects preserved in amber, these outdated digital gems function as "living time capsules" of the Web's early days. Their outdated look and feel, experimental spirit, and lack of commercial consciousness all provide an unintendingly clear view of our recent, but rapidly receding electronic past. MORE...
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