Ancient Web: Anthony Thyssen’s 1994 Homepage Was an Explorable Castle

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most early personal websites introduced their authors with a name, a photograph, and some links. Anthony Thyssen required visitors to enter a castle first.

Enter the Castle of Anthony Thyssen.

The front door is a prose description of a grand foyer: polished stone walls, a red carpet, runic buttons, and a glowing control panel. Thyssen greets visitors as a friend of dragons, a collector of rune-like icons, a kite flier, and a practitioner of computer magic. The page is explicitly dated December 2, 1994, with a revision marked January 9, 1997.

Instead of a normal menu, visitors navigate an imagined building. A link north into a courtyard leads to corridors in different directions and an ominous staircase toward the dungeon. A separate crossroads outside the walls advertises the Elven Forest, an invented village called Overshire, and a cliff-top walk. That outdoor page dates its creation to April 25, 1995.

The metaphor holds real information

Behind the role-playing text sits a substantial technical and personal homepage. Thyssen's about page identifies him as a systems programmer at Griffith University in Brisbane and discusses Unix administration, programming, graphical tools, and an unusually broad list of computer systems. He recalls helping provide an early permanent World Wide Web service in Queensland. That is his personal claim, not an independently verified priority record.

The castle worked as a navigation experiment because hyperlinks let individual rooms behave like locations in a story. You did not have to scroll through every hobby and project; you could wander, turn east or west, and discover what the webmaster had hidden down a corridor.

The present pages are hosted on GitLab Pages rather than the original 1994 server, and Thyssen's biography has clearly been updated since the oldest castle rooms. The dated pages nevertheless preserve the early layout and language of this particular hypertext experiment.

There was nothing inevitable about homepages becoming rectangular menus and uniform profile cards. This one remembers another possibility: the Web as a place to explore.

Visit the entrance hall and walk the old castle corridors.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.