First, some context.
One of the most fondly remembered aspects of the old Internet was the prevalence of personal homepages; filled with animated GIFs, gaudy backgrounds, and barebones HTML, these are considered a staple of the web’s first decade. When brought up, names such as Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod are typically the first to pop up, and their massive successes makes it clear that this is very rightfully so. What is often overlooked, however, is that in the tumultuous beginnings of the Internet’s mainstream adoption, only a small minority of homepages were hosted by websites such as these.
Following the initial explosion of the Internet’s popularity, an incalculable number of service providers began sprouting up all across the world. While the most recognizable were, of course, those that served entire nations – America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe are often the first that come to mind when it comes to those in the States, though there were loads more that nobody remembers – nearly every corner of the Internet-loving world was dotted with regional ISPs that have been all but forgotten today. I’ve scoured archives attempting to find a definitive listing of contemporary providers for any given area, but in nearly every case, there’s a few that have slipped through the cracks. This was due to the fact that starting your own service provider was shockingly easy during this period of the Internet’s history; investing in a server and several routers was all one needed to create a local ISP, and that’s what thousands did.
I could leave it at that, but I really want to drive this home. To illustrate my point, I’ll go ahead and pseudo-dox myself: I grew up in a small city in southeastern corner of Wisconsin known as Kenosha, with a population of less than 100,000 people. Back in the 1990s, one would have several options regarding which provider to sign up with in the area; while they could choose a national provider such as EarthLink or RoadRunner, let’s assume they had a preference for local business. The largest Wisconsin-based ISPs in the area were Exec-PC, Internet Connect, and Internet Dynamics. If they were a Bears-loving traitor, they could instead choose to go with Chicago’s MCSNet. All of these are valid choices, but suppose they want something even more local? Driving twenty minutes north of Kenosha will land you in Racine, a slightly smaller city that nevertheless maintains more relevance on account of the simple fact that it’s less boring. Two companies, CyberLynk and Wisconsin Internet, hail from this city; both also provided access to its southerly neighbor. However, if this person were for whatever reason real proud of being from Kenosha, there was also the option to go with AcroNet, a small Internet provider run out of someone’s house in the northern part of the city.
This is what I mean when I say there were loads of these things. If you were in a settlement with a population of more than three, you would likely find yourself with at least seventy different options when it came to what ISP to run with. I’ve tried finding as many as possible in order to compile a list (for reasons which you will soon learn), but it’s seemingly endless. Keep in mind that the example above only covers a small city that nobody cares about – if you were somewhere like Chicago, the number of access providers would be gargantuan, with certain businesses only providing access to certain parts of the city. As one can easily ascertain, this was a highly competitive market that required businesses to provide some sort of unique selling point to their potential customers.
This finally brings me to the aspect I’ve been leading up to: user homepages.
Many of these businesses offered much more than just simple Internet access. They had to in order to survive. E-mail, domain registration, web design services, and a web portal were all commonly bundled in upon signing up with these companies, but most importantly for the purposes of Protoweb was the very common practice of hosting user homepages on their company’s domain. This was very different from giving someone their own website, mind you; typically, what people would receive is a limited amount of server space at a URL along the lines of http://www.isp.net/~user/. Certain providers would also allow businesses and organizations to remove the tilde in order to make their URL slightly more memorable while also distinguishing themselves from the oftentimes massive amount of amateurish homepages maintained by individuals experimenting with web design for the first time. Domains were expensive at first, so until your site was popular enough to warrant its own standalone domain (or once domain prices had lowered enough), you would likely stick to one of these places at first. Most importantly for these early years of the Internet’s life, however, was the fact that an absolutely massive amount of it was located on ISP websites.
I won’t pretend to know everything about this topic – I was born in 2000, so I can only rely on first-hand accounts and my own research – but in the period of 1994 to 1997, the vast majority of user-made homepages seem to have been located on websites such as these. To go back to the beginning of this article, free hosting services such as Geocities and Tripod were available in tandem to these, but none of them seem to have matched the vastness of ISP user pages until 1998 or so. Obviously, the previously mentioned national providers are the most common domains one finds these (especially members.aol.com), but the sheer number of small, regional ISPs were more than enough to rival them and be an incredibly common sight among user homepage URLs.
Alas, they eventually did fade away. Why people flocked to free alternatives is something that I don’t know the answer to, though I assume it’s for several reasons and could probably fit into its own article. Nevertheless, by 1999, many of these websites lay abandoned, their owners having either forgotten about their stint with web design or having decided to transfer their site elsewhere. The late 90s also brought a mad dash to become the dominant Internet provider, meaning hundreds of local ISPs were bought out and had their once lively homepage listings wiped from the Internet. Then, once dedicated blogging and picture sharing websites appeared, many surviving ISPs decided to remove their user listings entirely.
That, however, took time; until then, Internet service providers were where you would go to find the tens of thousands of people experiencing the Internet for the first time.
That brings me to the website that has now been restored: http://www.oz.net/, the website of Seattle’s very own Sense Networking. Information regarding this company is scarce due to much of it being lost to time, but it seems to have been a decently successful ISP servicing the Seattle area until a merger with Tuscon’s River Networking and then subsequent buyout by StarNet (now SiteStar). While we weren’t able to restore everything, what’s there is still quite substantial. Seven businesses and 147 user sites are located on the website; some are small and possibly only a single page, while others are sprawling and could easily be mistaken as being completely standalone. It was a grueling process to bring it back to life, but in the end, it was very much worth it.
There’s enough there to spend several days browsing it, so in order to point out the highlights for those who don’t wish to get lost in the sea of animated GIFs and crude HTML, I’ll list a few below. There’s far more than just this, but these are some good starting points.
The personal website of Dave Brockman, containing both his very own Perry Mason wiki as well as pages dedicated to his countless hobbies (including a journal detailing his journey converting a porsche to an electric!)
A site dedicated to Marathon multiplayer in the Seattle area. Contains several demos, images, and maps.
Alternate name: Contrast slider abuse. An absolutely bizarre site dedicated to “Photoshop set design”.
Hosts solutions to the Rubiks Cube as well as some of its closely related siblings.
The homepage of MoonRock Software, creators of a Q-Bert-style game for Windows known as “QBob”. Includes a download for the shareware version of the game.
