Marcel van der Veer • Science • Technology • Education
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Recently, a letter was delivered that I knew would arrive some day.
For decades, I have published my website with one of the first internet service providers in the Netherlands, XS4ALL, that offered hosting for a simple website as a bonus to their internet subscriptions. Many Dutch internet pioneers therefore built their first homepages through XS4ALL. I was among them, proudly posting a homepage at 'my' personal subdomain
and later, when secure connections became commonplace, at
There have been several thousands of them. For the first time, people could express themselves to the world without needing intermediary companies or authorities. Since CMS tools would not arrive for years to come and the service only supported basic technology, those sites were creative and pluriform inventions. Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla etcetera are fantastic tools, but a consequence is that nowadays many sites have a uniform feel to them.
As is all too common, companies merge and large Dutch telecom provider KPN acquired XS4ALL. Professional hosting services were discontinued soon thereafter, though existing personal XS4ALL homepages remained online though hosting was outsourced. Since these early homepages would probably vanish eventually, the National Library of the Netherlands archived them as a web collection as part of a larger project preserving Dutch digital heritage, a collection that was later named UNESCO world heritage. Incidentally, the library started archiving my site as well, at a later stage.
The letter mentioned above informed me however that these last XS4ALL homepages would now also be taken offline. I will not deny that I had seen this coming. From a cost perspective I can understand that a large company cannot continue hosting a number of sites based on outdated technology, presuming that essential sites among them had moved on already.
So, fair enough I thought, still the letter left me with a double feeling. It heralded the end of an era in Dutch internet history. I would be deprived of my cherished site 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 - to republish my homepage at its own domain.
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. Only this time I own the domain name, so the new set-up should now be consolidation-proof. However, this site starts its new life as the static site it has always been. It evolves, yet stays the same.
All good things must come to an end. Hence thank you XS4ALL, for the many hours of happy HTML tinkering in a time when Netscape Navigator was the most advanced browser. For the last 25 years or so, 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.