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The other day, Bruce Sterling's Tumblr shared a remarkable image.



He linked to this remarkable blog taking a look at the distant past, the mid-1990s.

From: Atlas to the World Wide Web, published 20 years ago. It is is one of these brave books that attempted to introduce the Internet and its services to potential users and web masters and provide a list of WWW resources. It is one of these gorgeous books that had the full text of the book “fully hyperlinked” included on a CD-ROM. One of these heavy books that became obsolete even before they would exit the printing press.

New providers, browsers, tools were popping up every week; and the websites … they were already too numerous and too agile: being redesigned, re-purposed, moved, abandoned every other day. How many were left behind by their makers? Deleted by sysadmins? How many sunk into oblivion before the Internet Archive sent its crawlers out there? We don’t know. The lists published in those useless World Wide Web Encyclopedias, Guides, and Atlases are often the only reference to websites mostly hosted by universities, made by academics in their spare time.


Amazingly, the Norwegian mirror site is still online.
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