What Was Matt Thinking?

The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet.Essentially, here’s the deal. Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters. One in particular, WWWboard, became a massive hit, becoming one of the first widely used web forum apps on the internet.The copyright notice for WWWboard, Wright’s widely used forum-hosting software.The site Wright built, Matt’s Script Archive, unwittingly helped to highlight the…