Wow, ten years of smog, go figure. In October of 1995, smog.net was born under the bold and stupid mjptv.com domain. The site was later briefly named monkeychow while at the mjptv domain, then I registered smog.net and that’s what it’s been called since. But I still like monkeychow.
There were less than 20,000 web sites in October of 1995, so I guess that makes me a pioneer of sorts. Though it hardly matters now, since your mother probably has her own web site. And smog isn’t as “important” as it once was, now that I serve only myself, rather than half of the rest of the world.
Those old Netcraft surveys are interesting (sorry, all the old links are broken now). The first one was done in August of 95, and it lists over 100 different kinds of web server software! If that is meaningless to you, look at it like this, there are now basically only two web servers running all 74 million sites on the net.
18,957 web sites total in August of 95. Things have changed quite a bit. There used to be actual print magazines that reviewed and rated sites, which of course seems utterly pointless now, and rather quaint in retrospect. I have a CD from the July 1996 issue of Net Power magazine, and I don’t think one link on that thing still works. I should zip up the CD so you can download it and see the state of the art almost ten years ago. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll yawn. (I tried, but some files can’t even be copied from the CD – ha!)
Actually, I see now that this disc came from a magazine called The Net…that was a pretty cool magazine. They once wrote an article about how you could get online (computer and connection, mind you) for less than the price of 15 Taco Bell burritos or something. You’ll never read anything like that in WIRED.
Hmm, I got sidetracked there for a bit, which happens often with me.
Just back from New York. More about that next time.