Matt's Script Archive (1995)(scriptarchive.com) |
Matt's Script Archive (1995)(scriptarchive.com) |
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
But I always think of https://www.theninhotline.com/news/ as a hacked guestbook script.
It's somewhat interesting to me that, according to Wikipedia, the word "blog" as an abbreviation of weblog came into use the month before I started that site.
Thanks for sharing these into the world. I found them a huge help.
I ran a forum (30k+ monthly users) last century using the WWWboard.
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
<isml type="counter">
There's a subreddit dedicated to these kinds of sites: https://reddit.com/r/forgottenwebsites/
Matt's Script Archive, Inc.: Free Perl CGI Scripts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33305258 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)
Matt's Script Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789342 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Matt's Script Archive. Offering free CGI scripts to the web community since 1995 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391802 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
Its value and place in history can't be overstated.
We've definitely lost some part of the charm of the early web when it was common to get email, web space, FTP, and even shell access from your ISP.
Then we started transitioning to Lisp, and somehow ended up with PHP.
In any case, I don't think I'd be here without your help, Matt. Big, big thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NHTRgH3G0
(Caution very NSFW language)
In 1995-ish, I had just started working at a new ISP. My boss dropped Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days on my desk and said, "You need to learn to make guestbooks and things for our users." Your scripts were a big help in getting me up to speed.
I wonder whether dang meant 1% of registered visitors, or 1% of visitors.
Looking at your website brings me back to my childhood.
After enough time elapses (and it has!) it transitions from being "bad code" to just nostalgia-inducing.
Take a gander at the code over at TUHS. The original vi from UCB, for instance, wouldn't be considered "good code" by anyone's standards in the past 40+ years, but nobody is thinking poorly of Bill Joy, Mary Ann Horton, or anyone else involved.
What amazes me most is: How the hell did you maintain interest in keeping the site alive after so much time had elapsed? 1995 was so different from e.g. 2009 and I imagine the same was true of you.
These days, the thing that most impresses my nephews is that I posted the second ever video to YouTube (college roommate was a cofounder). I have long since lost control of the channel (it was taken during a transition from old YouTube accounts to Google accounts when someone guessed the simple password). Since hacker news can sometimes be the support site of the internet I'll throw it out there -- if anyone has a contact at YouTube that can return the channel to me, that would be awesome. I imagine it is long-since gone.