Nestled along California’s northern coast are two counties: Humboldt and Del Norte. Comprising a 5,282 sq. mi. (13,690km²) swathe of land, this region of the Golden State is an incredibly remote expanse that is taken up almost entirely by vast Redwood forests. Of the 164,206 individuals who live in these two counties, nearly half of them live in the small communities such as Eureka and Arcata that surround the comparatively miniscule Humboldt Bay; the rest live in towns that dot the remaining coastline.
As was the case with anywhere else in the United States, the 1990s brought internet access to this part of the state. According to a self-proclaimed “communist vampire” whose homepage can be found on the website of this newly restored ISP,
“I use Northcoast Internet, but mostly because they give me lots of free web space, they keep terrible records and i’ve gotten countless months of free access, and they let me use space on their precious Unix to do my web browsing. Not so bad! The other local options are Humboldt Internet and Tidepool. There are a few other start-ups, but they’re not off the ground entirely yet. Sad, isn’t it?”
While Humboldt Internet seems to have been the most successful of these, I chose to go with Northcoast to represent this area for two reasons. The first is that Humboldt simply isn’t very well-archived, and the second is that Northcoast hosted the pages of several people who made custom levels for games, thus making it far more of a priority to me.
This gets into the reason as to why I became so fascinated with these types of websites in the first place – Doom modding. I have been in the Doom community for over ten years now, and all throughout I have been utterly fascinated by the community that developed during the 1990s. It was distributed across Usenet, BBS boards, and most importantly for Protoweb, homepages that were most often found on either the websites of universities or those of small internet providers like this one. Geocities, Angelfire, and many of the specialized websites such as Telefragged and PlanetQuake only began to fully take the place of these services during the final two years of the decade. That initial community, which was slowly fading away as newer games released and newer talent took their place, never jumped ship over to those services. By the time the new millennium rolled around, it was all but gone.
This is not a unique feature of Doom however, as can be seen with this ISP. In addition to Doom WADs, within the 73 sites in Northcoast.com there are also Warcraft II PUDs and Marathon II maps; this was a common aspect of communities surrounding highly moddable games released during the mid-90s. The same can be seen with the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Command & Conquer elsewhere; they all existed in a highly decentralized network of ISPs, free hosting services (do keep in mind that Geocities and Angelfire were far from the only ones like this at the time), and a few standalone domains. In fact, on a broader scale, these were just a reflection of how the web used to be. It’s a misconception rooted in the web of today that these early fandoms are easily accessible by going to a single location – finding them requires exploration.
With that being said, I hope you have fun exploring this one, and I hope it helps to make Protoweb feel larger.
