Going through some older documents today, I stumbled across an interesting URL. Imagine my surprise when I pasted it into my browser and got this back:
Mason’s homepage from December, 1996. The oldest working page I can find on Brewster Kahle’s Wayback Machine dates from 2000 so this pushes us back an additional four years.I served as sysadmin/webmaster in those days (as I recall by this point we had moved from a SPARC 5 to a SPARC 20) and as you can plainly see I had just about mastered Web 0.5 design. The fine print on the “MasonLink Crawler” section (a Harvest installation I had running at the time) shows that there were 12,000 documents on Mason’s web. Googling “site:gmu.edu” today returns 784,000 documents so clearly it’s growing…
In some cases, the URLs still work but most take you to a newer page. In a few cases, the old 1996 stuff is still hanging around. A gold star to the campus web crew for their stealthly (and likely unintentional) archiving.