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{"Pánta chorei kaì oudèn ménei"
Plato, on Heraclitus' flux doctrine.} |
Recently, a letter was delivered that I knew would arrive someday. I had already given thought to its subject in anticipation. Let me explain, please.
For decades, I have published my website with one of the first Internet Service Providers in the Netherlands, XS4ALL, which offered hosting for a static homepage as a bonus to an internet subscription. XS4ALL was not the only one to offer this little extra, but it was a larger, socially involved ISP that 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. Those 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, 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.
These homepages were probably intended to keep friends and relatives informed on matters of personal interest - I presume that many recipes, photo albums and family trees have been shared this way. However, it is only human nature to explore, and through these homepages people could for the first time express themselves with relative ease, not only within their own circles but to the whole world. 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, simple repositories to distribute homebrew software, as well as early online shops and even primitive virtual worlds. An internet analogue of the Cambrian explosion, if you will.
Please allow me to digress a little. I recall wiring the first monthly fee at a post office when subscribing to XS4ALL. The same evening I was online, asking myself what to do next. Nowadays, you just download required applications. Not so thirty years ago, when your ISP would send you by mail physical media with necessary software. 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 of my "Internet Kit". Note the XS4ALL logo, which was apparently designed as a Dutch black-on-yellow license plate, since at the time the internet was known as the Digital Highway.
Also, 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 a telephone modem, and while you were online, your family had to queue to use the phone. Your ISP would arrange for a local phone number, to help 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 of disk space and one gigabyte of data traffic per month. Below is a screenshot of the uncomplicated landing page of my site from that time, which mainly was a vehicle for the distribution of Algol 68 Genie. The page 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, but 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 that I received informed me that these last XS4ALL homepages will now also be taken offline. I will not deny that I saw this coming. Considering modern internet technology, it would be reasonable to assume that important sites among them would already have moved on. How long would a telecom provider for which hosting is not a core business, keep those remaining homepages online? For a reasonable number of years, as it turned out.
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 would be deprived of my cherished homepage, which has been "mine" for thirty years. On the other hand, the time had arrived to move forward with a plan I was already preparing, namely to republish my website at its own domain. To be honest, it was about time, since my simple homepage had developed over the years into a complete blog.
The result is the site you are visiting today. 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 it remains the static site it has always been. Part of the spirit from the time when the internet was young lives on.
Our National Library will close its XS4ALL web collection once the last homepages go offline. I am pleased however, that the library has decided to continue archiving this new website as part of their general web collection. Hence, that aspect of my site also remains as it was.
All good things must come to an end. Hence thank you XS4ALL, for the countless hours of happy tinkering since the time when Netscape Navigator was the most advanced browser. The main purpose of my site, old or new, is to distribute Algol 68 Genie and to be a blog for subjects I take an interest in. I will continue publishing under this new banner and hope, dear reader, that you will keep accompanying me.
