Ghost Sites of the Web: Where Dead Sites Live On... Where Web Disasters Are Still Fresh

Identifying and critiquing aging, abandoned, and derelict web sites since 1996. Includes a Web 1.0 screenshot library, essays, and "The Museum of E-Failure." By Internet Marketing veteran Steve Baldwin.

April 06, 2007

Antique Web Browsers Still Surfing at DejaVu.Org

Old Web Browsers Soldier on at DeJavu.org
A few nights ago, I came across an extraordinary site that's been online for several years called DejaVu.org. It isn't a new site (it went online in the late 1990's), but its main offerings - a timeline of Web development, and a uniquely compelling WWW browser emulator that lets the Web surfer see sites the way early Web pioneers experienced them, using vintage NSCA Mosaic 0.9, Netscape 1.0, Internet Explorer 2.0, Lynx, line-mode, and even my personal favorite: the famed HotJava browser - have grown even more appealing as time has moved on. We were so moved by the experience of viewing the Web in this way that we reached out to DejaVu.org's creator, Par Lannero, and he granted us this brief interview from Stockholm.

Ghost Sites: What was the inspiration behind DejaVu.org?

Par Lannero: As you can read in the timeline part of dejavu.org, I was watching and taking part in the development of the Web from a very early stage. Everybody I knew in the IT sector 1996-1998 was playing around with fun Web ideas, and dejavu was simply one of many ideas I came up with. Another one was a Web-based buddy list system which I finished the day before Somebody told me about a similar project from a company called Mirabilis. With the speed that their project spread over the Internet, there was no use in releasing my own project. Yet another idea was a system to manage Web bookmarks on the Web instead of in the browser client. That one I actually implemented, and I have been using it almost every day since 1996. It wasn't just me - everybody seemed to come up with fun ideas those days... :)

Ghost Sites: It looks to me that several people besides yourself were instrumental in creating the browser emulators. Who did what and how long did it take to get it going?

Par Lannero: My friend Elias Bengtsson and a Ville Hising at Bazooka.se produced a few images. Per Gullfeldt of Digital Equipment Corporation provided a server as sponsorship. Daniel Bergström has made sure the Web server is (almost) always up and running. The rest of the people in the credits list are colleagues from the time when I was working with dejavu. They provided the necessary encouragement for me to actually launch the site. I did all programming and writing by myself. Mostly in 1997-98, but I have been fixing a few things since then.

Ghost Sites: As you're probably aware, there is a lot more historical Web matter online than there was back in the late 1990's. I speak specifically of archive.org's massive "Wayback Machine". Do you have any plans to work with this organization so that your browser emulator might be used to view some of the preserved historical sites?

Par Lannero: I have thought about that, too. But since I have no income from the dejavu project, I can only spend a few hours now and then. If I get sponsorship or if I lose my job or something I might be able to develop the site further. One big advantage, though, when dealing with history, is that it doesn't change very quickly, so there is no hurry. :)

Ghost Sites: Your excellent Timeline of Web Innovation seems to stop at the end of 1999. Why does it end here? Did innovation trail off or did you stop work on DejaVu.org? If the latter, do you have any plans to revive it?

Par Lannero: I have not spent much time updating the site since 1999. Of course, a few things have happened since then, but I definitely think innovation slowed down around 1998. Before that year I always used a beta version of Netscape - every new improvement was worth the time it took to download and install. Today I don't care what browser I use, since there is nothing much happening.

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August 27, 2005

More Ghosts of Silicon Alley


Silicon Alley Station, an independent Web-based radio network whose beat was New York's technology sector, has not updated its content in more than a year.

This is sad, because SAS, in its day, provided high-quality, hype-free coverage of technology developments in New York in an appealing, free format that generally bettered the efforts of the deep-pocketed mainstream media. To my knowledge, no one is about to enter the vacuum left behind by SAS; a sure sign that as far as the Internet Rapture is concerned, New York is a city "left behind."

SAS and New York's technology scene might be dead, but the site's streaming audio archives live on, although it's likely only a matter of time before they too become inaccessible. Highlights include interviews with many former luminaries of New York's late 1990's technology scene, making it a virtual time capsule of Gotham City's high hopes, world-dominating dreams, and wackily star-crossed illusions of the late 1990's.

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October 28, 2003

Why Study Web History at All?

I've been collecting all kinds of cyberjunk for years. Old Microsoft Developer T-shirts, Flooz handerchiefs, pre-AOL Time-Warner frisbees, and yes, pictures of old dead web sites. I also collect old railroad timetables and match book covers - maybe there's a connection there somewhere.

So I'm a pack rat - on the Web and in RL - and I know I'm not alone. In fact, pack rats are probably less interesting and less numerous creatures than Jackdaws, which steal, horde, and festoon their nests with any shiny bright bauble they fly over during their work day. Neither Charles Darwin nor anybody else has figured out why these strange birds collect the shiny effluvia left behind by human beings: they just do it, and perhaps their behavior furthers their attempt to gain a long-term foothold in evolution's spiral that we'll never completely understand.

Perhaps you're a digital jackdaw too. Perhaps there's a part of you that will really never get over the first hallucinogenic moment - perhaps in 1993 or '94, perhaps last week, when you saw the Web for the first time. In the same way that drug addicts will spend their life savings trying to recapture that first mad moment of ecstacy, people deeply impressed by their first exposure to the World Wide Web frequently return to it, or perhaps it returns to them. Either way, the Web provides constant reminders of its past - and a vortex back into time, when we were all younger, richer, fresher, and life at 56K was the norm.

Nostalgic sounding, doesn't it? Web Nostalgia isn't really big right now - the last 10 years are still with us - some would say "all too much with us". But it will come, in the same way that Saturday Night Fever keeps coming back, or scooters, skateboards, yo-yo's, and mindless rhythmic music. At the risk of sounding like a latter-day Joe Franklin (the "world's number one collectible of memorabilia"), it's all too likely that the Web soon take its place in the pantheon of lost fads, and perhaps that's where it belongs, right next to one's old 386SX notebook, an Apple IIe, and one's never used Radio Shack CB Radio.

But wait a minute - wasn't the Web - yes, this thing that somehow is bringing you the thing that you are now reading - going to be a lot more than simply a fad that would come, go, and expire as soon as something better more interesting came along? Didn't the Web represent a quantum leap for humanity, in terms of realizing the global "noosphere" predicted by visionaries such as Tielhard De Chardin? If so - if there was and is something culturally unique going on here that is the very beginning of what is a much longer-term trend - are we not obligated to treat it with a bit more respect than yesterday's garbage?

This isn't just idle "jackdaw-level" curiosity at all the bright shiny baubles we've created in the last 10 years. The very idea of studying Web History (as opposed to Net History or Computer History) supposes that there was and is something unique on the Web - especially in terms of how it synergetically combines text, image, speech, and anciallary forms in a special "sensory web" that makes it more than simply "all that there stuff that uses the Hypertext Transport Protocol), And yet the sad truth is that most of the Web - perhaps 99% of its terrabytes of information - is cybergarbage whose evanescence is probably well-deserved. The problem, of course, is deciding which part gets preserved and which thrown out. Who controls history? Well - we do - at least until the historical record disappears (Note: the average life of a Web page is a mere 44 days).

One thing we - historians, amateur ones like myself and profession ones inside the academy - can say is that the Web is a creature with a big brain but no memory facilities. In fact, one could almost call it brain-damaged in terms of its inability to retain much of its own past. Dystopians term it an Orwellian medium that doesn't even need a poor sot like Winston Smith to rewrite the files maintained at the Ministry of Truth - the Web deletes itself, through a complex web of interactions - some technological, others purely social - all of which conspire to make it an ephemeral, malleable, and impermanent.communications channel - more like the telephone than the telegraph.

Why study Web History? Well - because it's really damned strange, when you really start to sort though the digital dumpster. And once in awhile, one can find a discarded pearl or two of wisdom there. But more importantly, as computer-mediated information grows (in 2002, human beings created about 800 megabytes each), it's clear that nobody - outside a handful of institutions that each have their own approach to the problem - is making the connection between our digital past and our digital future.

What was the Web Generation up to in its first 10 years? What did they build here? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it blind? Was it stupid? Could it hold a key to what's next? Is it simply rubbish that's as dead as yesterday's news? Or do all of these questions pale when compared to the ultimate question - did Karl Marx's prediction that humanity will reach "The End of History" actually refer not to a triumph of socialism, but to our arrival at a cliff heralding a new, possibly digital Dark Age, wherein history will actually disappear in some undreamt of meta-systemic-crash, like an "info-stroke"? Is History Itself "Obsolete"? That's the "ah-hah" question that lurks - like a ghoul - at the end of any extended meditation upon this subject.

Web Historians are not futurists, but anti-futurists who reason that our strange, jackdaw-like behavior and our habit of looking backward, not forward, is no more dangerous than focussing exclusively on the road ahead. Studying the past through the Web presents a view that cuts against the grain of the future-bias of this medium, which always and forever will be focussed on the Now and the Next (as it was designed to do). Many of us reject the notion that a central canonical "Web History" can ever be written, or that it even should be written. That perhaps a decentralized set of "histories" might more accurately describe the actual zeitgeist of digital culture, even if they suffer from an alarming lack of comprehension.

What unites us is that there is something about the notion of all this impermenance that deeply disturbs us. Perhaps we see that the New Library of Alexandria is being made not of marble, but of straw. Perhaps we're just a bunch of jackdaws whose Quixote-like quest to capture and preserve artifacts from early digital culture is ultimately pointless. Maybe we're just stick-in-the muds suffering from a kind of nauseating motion sickness that Internet Time induces over long periods of exposure. Or brave "Necronauts", as Bruce Sterling puts it, who just dig banging around in abandoned industrial sites. We ourselves do not always know who we are. But these and other considerations go a long way to answer the question: "Why Study Web History at All?"

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