30 Years on the Web

On Friday, August 30th, 1996, I published a message on the “soc.culture.argentina” Usenet newsgroup, announcing the existence of a new page on this thing called “the web”: the URL was http://sc2a.unige.ch/~kosmacze and it was my first personal website. That URL does not exist anymore, and sadly the Internet Archive never archived it. I do have some fragments here and there, in some very old CD-ROMs I burned at the turn of the millenium, but I haven’t been able to find a proper, exhaustive backup of the whole thing. To give you an idea, this is what the home page of sc2a.unige.ch looked like in December of 1996. This was “the web”; a bunch of text formatted with Times New Roman, or whatever the default serif font was in your workstation. In that message I also asked for help, since I was using a text-based operating system (a VAX system running an old version of VMS) and I did not have a computer with Netscape available to test the page. Imagine that. How did I create that content? At…