Homepage history

2026/08/15

Homepage history

I got online in the early 90s, at first via the uni, then via the first internet provider in the Netherlands, xs4all (which has an interesting and inspiring history, the book De hackers die Nederland veranderden is a recommended read if you’re interested in the early internet and hacking culture and surprisingly relevant).

In the early years, access to internet did not just mean getting online to read what others had crafted: it also meant getting a personal space for whatever you liked to put online for the world to see, a homepage. Not just consuming, but also giving back to the community.

I wrote on my homepage quite extensively for a while, coding everything by hand, later generated by a bunch of perlscripts. It lived at www.xs4all.nl/~driek - and when the tilde+username syntax had to go, it became driek.home.xs4all.nl.

Alas, xs4all is no more, and now even the homepages have disappeared, or are about to: end of an era, indeed. Years ago I saw the writing on the wall and got my own domain via Freedom Internet, the spiritual successor to xs4all. But I never migrated the content of my homepage to this new site. However, I have a copy of the files, and I’m going to re-publish some of them.

And the first item is a very personal page I put together almost 30 years ago: a small tribute and in memoriam to the father of my then partner. It’s a time capsule in many ways: I was thirty years younger and my writing was a little cringy (I do hope I sound less pretentious these days). Also, the original was made to work on both Mosaic and non-graphic browsers and was full of table tags… but mostly, nowadays this would be a post on social media, not a webpage.

David Lennox Booth, an in memoriam

After putting this page online, via mailing lists and webrings it found its way to people who read it - and dozens of netizens contacted me with details of the images, as well as many kind words. It was a tribute to a man who I remember as in a very gentle way happily old-fashioned, so it seems fitting to put it online again in the same vein: as a tribute both to David the man, and to the original spirit of the internet.