nanog mailing list archives

Re: Network visibility


From: Jay Hennigan <jay () west net>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2021 12:38:37 -0700

On 10/20/21 11:52, Kain, Becki (.) wrote:
Oh and I remember the day we first got mosaic and I thought “why would I need pictures on the internet?”

Couple that with the early search engines such as Lycos and WebCrawler and there's a story to tell.

I was a volunteer at a local non-profit fledgling ISP way back in the day. Sparc 10, bank of Practical Peripherals modems, Portmaster 2e, blistering fast frame-relay T-1 to the net, typical state-of-the-art setup for its time.

I was doing a lot of the early network stuff, and another guy was the system admin. He put together a quick personal page that included a picture of a potted plant. No real reason for it, he threw it together primarily so he could test the new Mosaic browser.

Somewhat as a joke, he included an ALT tag on the photo of the plant, "This is not a picture of a naked woman." This was for the benefit of the majority of the visitors using Lynx.

About a week later, the blistering fast T-1 line became quite saturated with visitors to his personal test page. Search engines picked up the keywords and people on the Internet did what people on the Internet are still doing today.

ALT tag got changed pretty quickly.

--
Jay Hennigan - jay () west net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV


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