Salon | 21st: What's new is old

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T A B L E__T A L K

Life in the information age: Share your stories and rants on password snafus, multiple area codes, incompatible software and server failure in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Tricks of the trade
By David Futrelle
A Web radio show gives porn-site webmasters a place to talk shop and schmooze
(03/27/98)

Renaissance geeks
By Simon Firth
Silicon Valley sees itself as the new Florence. Then why is it so godawfully ugly?
(03/26/98)

Pictures from an exhibition
By Scott Rosenberg
With the Smithsonian's new Web site, getting around is half the fun
(03/25/98)

Please, Mr. Postman?
By Andrew Leonard
Netscape's and Microsoft's software just don't get along -- and God help anyone who tries to get them to make up and be nice
(03/24/98)

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Bright ideas for techno-schools
(03/23/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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WHAT'S NEW IS old
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A time capsule from the
Web's infancy offers
intimations of
technological mortality.

_____BY ANDREW LEONARD | Once upon a time, a geek named Martijn Koster posted the takeout menu for his favorite Indian restaurant on a personal Web page -- and the world took notice. Of course, this was back in the summer of 1993, and the world -- or at least the part of the world on the Web -- was a good deal smaller then.

Today, the Web is famous for its boundless wealth of irrelevant and useless information. But in July 1993, when the number of Internet-connected computers capable of delivering Web pages totaled mere hundreds, any addition to the Web's corpus of knowledge was deemed a major event. Koster's takeout menu was soon memorialized in the Web's first chronicle of record -- the NCSA What's New list.

The NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is the birthplace of the Mosaic Web browser, the single piece of software most responsible for initiating the Web era. The What's New list -- which was originally Mosaic programmer Marc Andreessen's bookmark list -- documents the first baby steps of that era. As a primitive community bulletin board, it exerts a strange fascination. Amid dry accounts of a university here or a laboratory there converting Gopher menus or ftp servers into Web sites, the budding Web archaeologist can discover outbursts of adolescent glee at the signs of a brand new thing being born -- at being witness to the creation.

Treating the What's New archives as fossils waiting for Web paleontologists' perusal may seem a bit silly. After all, 1993, rationally speaking, just isn't that long ago. The Clinton presidency had just begun and "Seinfeld" had already been on the air for four seasons. A child born in the summer of 1993 isn't even in kindergarten yet.

But archaeology is not as ludicrous a parallel as it may sound: A review of these pages does conjure up a kind of lost world. The What's New archives are not simply an account of the beginning of the Web -- they're also testament to the fundamental impermanence of cyberspace.

N E X T_P A G E .|. The heady days of the Web's Big Bang