Ancient Web: ARGnet Left Its 1997 ISP Complaints in the Guestbook Era

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A website can preserve computing history without deliberately becoming a museum. All it needs is an author who complained about his modem in public, then left the complaints online for nearly thirty years.

Visit Andrew R. Gillett's ARGnet.

Gillett, writing as ARGanoid, introduces his site as a personal collection founded in 1997. Its current page is proudly no longer dependent on frames and admits that most of the original writing dates from 1997 and 1998. The navigation moves among Atari ST demos, games such as Captain Blood, his own programming projects, old graphics, comedy, and an 'ancient blog.'

The blog is the prize. In April 1998 he was waiting for a modem, weighing Netscape against Internet Explorer, and discovering that a friend's page could be harder to upload than to design. By October he was comparing Virgin Net and Freeserve as Internet service providers. The differences were not theoretical: access depended on speed, telephone bills, Usenet access, and whether the provider actually connected.

A public diary of disappearing infrastructure

Gillett recorded his frustration with the free British provider screaming.net in 1999, including endless redialing and unreliable transfers. Elsewhere the entries describe the thrill of emailing Atari ST programmers whose work he once admired from afar.

The blog preserves small, recognizable milestones: the arrival of a Pentium II, experiments with BeOS, working on a Quake II modification named Stupid Arena, and site graphics redesigned in response to readers. There is even a note from late 1997 complaining that Windows Notepad could not comfortably handle an increasingly large HTML file.

These are personal recollections, not universal measurements of ISP performance. That subjectivity is useful. The page preserves the ordinary emotional texture of early consumer Internet use: anticipation, frustration, community, and sometimes triumph over a particularly uncooperative connection.

Gillett has since updated parts of the navigation and links to modern social accounts. But he did not erase the old blog when the technology changed.

Explore ARGnet and read its dated diary.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.