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Recently, a letter was delivered that I knew would arrive some day. I had already given thought to its subject in anticipation.
For decades, I have published my website with one of the first ISPs (Internet Service Provider) in the Netherlands, XS4ALL, that offered hosting for a simple website as a bonus to their internet subscriptions. XS4ALL were not the only one to offer this little extra, but they were a larger, socially involved ISP who drew media attention - that will explain why they are remembered while the others faded from memory. Fact is that many early internet users in the Netherlands built and posted homepages through XS4ALL. I was among them, proudly posting a homepage at 'my' subdomain, jmvdveer.
In 1998, XS4ALL reported hosting almost twelve thousand personal homepages. They were listed alphabetically in a simple online directory as illustrated in the image below; note the absence of a search function. A report of the National Library of the Netherlands shows that in the period 2019-2021, more than eighteen thousand homepage URLs, beit active or not, have been identified. From the still accessible ones, over three thousand were selected for the XS4ALL web collection of the library. Incidentally, the library started archiving my homepage as well. This web collection was later named UNESCO world heritage.
Through their personal homepages, people could for the first time express themselves to the world with relative ease. Since CMS tools would not arrive for years to come and the service only supported basic technology, those sites were creative and pluriform inventions. Their builders experimented with nascent social media and online communication, new ways to publish works of art, as well as early online shops and even primitive virtual worlds. An internet analogue of the Cambrian explosion, if you will.
Please allow me a digression here. Nowadays, all software you need is made available through the web for download. Not so thirty years ago. Your ISP would supply you with physical media containing the software you needed. When I contracted XS4ALL in the mid 1990's, that would typically be a floppy disk. I was amused to discover that I still have one in my archives, see the picture below. Apparently the XS4ALL logo was designed as a Dutch license plate, black on yellow, since at the time the internet was also known as the Digital Highway.
In the 1990's, there was no such thing as WiFi or mobile data yet, and routers were dedicated minicomputers, not the household items that appeared around the turn of the century. As a home user, you would call your ISP over a landline using telephone modems, and your family had to queue for using the phone. There would be a local phone number near you, to save on the telephone company bill.
The bandwidth of those modems was nowhere near today's standards, think of a few kilobytes of data per second. That puts the relative simplicity of early webpages, and XS4ALL homepages for that matter, in a different perspective, as well as the standard limits for a homepage at the turn of the century - ten megabytes disk space and one gigabyte data traffic per month. Below is a screenshot of the simple landing page of my site from that time. The page accessed by the top link is still here as a post, by the way.
Let us return to the present day now. Companies merge, and large Dutch telecom provider KPN acquired XS4ALL. Professional hosting services were discontinued, though existing personal XS4ALL homepages remained online. No new homepages were accepted. Since these early homepages would probably vanish eventually, the National Library of the Netherlands archived a considerable number of them, as mentioned earlier.
The letter mentioned above informed me that these last XS4ALL homepages will now also be taken offline. I will not deny that I had seen this coming, wondering how long a telecom provider for whom hosting is not a core business, would continue keeping these vintage homepages online. Considering modern internet technology, it would be reasonable to assume that professional sites among them would have moved on already. The remaining homepages were supported for a reasonable number of years after all.
So, fair enough I thought while reading the letter, still it left me with a double feeling. It heralded the end of an era in Dutch internet history. I will be deprived of my cherished homepage which I have been using for thirty years. On the other hand, the time had arrived to move forward with a plan I was preparing for some time, namely to republish my homepage at its own domain. The result is the site you are visiting today.
This time, I have my own domain name, so the new set-up is consolidation-proof. Like thirty years ago, I contracted services with a not-too-large, independent hosting company offering good technical support. My homepage starts a new life, though remains the static site it has always been. Part of the spirit from the time when the internet was young, lives on.
The National Library of the Netherlands will close its XS4ALL web collection once the last homepages go offline. I am pleased however, that the library has decided to continue archiving my new website as part of their general web collection aimed at preserving Dutch digital heritage for future generations of researchers. Hence also that aspect of this site remains as it was.
All good things must come to an end. Hence thank you XS4ALL, for the many hours of happy tinkering in a time when Netscape Navigator was the most advanced browser. The main purpose of my site has been to distribute Algol 68 Genie and to be a blog for subjects I take an interest in. I will continue doing these things I am passionate about under a new banner and hope, dear reader, that you will keep accompanying me.
Published in Essays. More on Computer history, Digital heritage or Internet.
© 1993-2026 J.M. van der Veer
jmvdveer@algol68genie.nl
