Well I’ll always remember my first few months in Peterborough. I know it probably wasn’t the greatest time to move down here, November 1st, just in time for winter, but they tell me it is a pretty city for summer so I guess we will see. We did manage to get curling in Norwood and made some nice friends and left our team in first place, but they have one more game to play, if they lose we could slip to #2.
Aziel and I are off to the Caribbean tomorrow for our 7day Southern Cruise with Royal Caribbean starting in San Juan. We go from San Juan to St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Antigua, St. Lucia and Barbados. Should be fun, well we hope so anyway.
I was reading Digg this morning over breakfast and noticed the article about The Internet Archive. Good little article about the history of the Web, not to be confused with the Internet. Here’s a blurb:
Growth at the Pace of the InternetThe Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that is compiling a historic database of Web sites and other digital content. This archival database expands with the Internet, and so grows by nearly 100TBs every month. |
They are taking snapshots of every website on the World Wide Web and storing them. The fun part is going to that page and typing in an address to see how it looked years ago. Mine only goes back to 2001. I’ve had this domain since the mid-90s, but never used it, just had it for the email.
My first website I created was back in 1993, but never published, then I published my first website around 1994, but it was internal to Lakehead University. Then it got moved from cs_acad to the student directory http://flash.lakheadu.ca (which itself has been retired) and by 1997 I had moved my website to whatever ISP I was currently with. It was on Tbaytel for a bit and when I was in Wawa it was on www.adss.on.ca, I was one of two people with a site there. I also hosted on free Cadvision servers, www.air.on.ca and www.shaw.ca for a while.
Back in the day (does that make me sound old?) I was pulling in over 50,000 hits a month and had a few letters from whatever ISP I was with wondering what I had on my site. It was mostly due to the huge involvement I had with the Red Baron - WWI Flight Community and being the CO of a group called the KNS (Knights of the North Star).
I realized that moving my site around and giving people a new url once or twice a year, even though www.hatfield.on.ca would redirect to those sites, was annoying. Canadians with a business got free domains when UBC managed the .CA domain so I got one and just used the two free emails with it for years. Finally with my student years behind me, I finally splurged and put down the $10/month for space and got my domain setup. It was already pretty big as I had been running it on ISP’s for 5-6 years, but around 2000 it truely had a life of its own.
So looking back on the web archive, I see it only goes back to 2001, and now I have to see if I can remember the old urls I changed so often to see if I can find the truly old ones back to the early-mid 90s. Lakehead blocked the search engines and archiving of Flash, so those are gone, now, where to start….
