Network visibility

Wed Oct 20 19:38:37 UTC 2021

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 at west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV