About 9 years ago, when I first got my hands on a 384Kbps DSL (SDSL, even!) line, after playing around with Napster, I started to run a linux web server from my room off a 486, pretty much just like you’d expect.
Another thing I did then is register a dhs.org dynamic hostname to point to my server, in case the IP address changed (it didn’t, actually). I went with dhs.org because it was the shortest name that allowed dynamic hostnames for free (or near-free, $5/yr) at the time. This market has tons of options now, but was a bit emptier then. Further research shows I likely found it via naim.n.ml.org which is a great console unix AIM client by Daniel Reed.
Over the years, these hostnames pointed to photo galleries where friends uploaded photo albums (before Facebook), an AI-powered chat bot for the VAST band website (one reference here, post page) and more. That can be a subject of another post altogether, but lets just say that teenage fans are capable of accomplishing impressive feats of technology. I setup the weird ALICE java package, styled the output and configured extra AI conversational topics relating to the upcoming album, on a Sun Solaris machine that sat under the table. All because I was talking to another VAST fan on AIM one night at 2am (woke up for school at 630-700am) and he told me that Jon (the singer) had a bot idea like this for the site and then I thought “Hm, I can do that!”
Today though, I am closing the account (not much use anymore) and it’s impressive to notice that dhs.org is still around and going 9 years later (it started in 1998). In today’s rapidly moving web, anything with a feeling of permanence stands out. Hat is off to Darryl Lynch, the operator.
How many projects or websites do you still interact with after a decade? What are they?
Google and Amazon are probably the two oldest websites I use.
