Ancient Web: Eddie Matejowsky's 2008 Homepage Is a Workshop Shelf

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Eddie Matejowsky's homepage reads like opening the door to a garage and finding a glider, a composting toilet, a model aircraft, a computer museum, and the start of a novel. At least the signs are clearly labeled.

Visit Eddie's old homepage

The site identifies its owner as Eddie Matejowsky of Queensland, Australia, and says it was updated January 12, 2008. It explicitly calls itself the old site, pointing visitors to newer work elsewhere while leaving the original link collection available.

In other words, the website knows that it has become an archive.

A list of projects with real consequences

The homepage connects to experiments with turbo stoves, a wood-burning heater, a chainsaw mill, and composting facilities. There are travel photographs of camping trips to islands off Queensland, a gliding page tracing the owner's flying interest back to 1986, and notes about Nimbin Rocks Cooperative, which he says he joined in 1996.

The most illuminating surviving subsection concerns radio-controlled aircraft photography. Matejowsky recounts work beginning in 2004 and experiments through 2005 with model aircraft, wireless cameras, transmitters, and an early attempt at remote-pilot viewing.

This was very much before affordable camera drones made aerial shots ordinary. He describes buying an expensive model that crashed, replacing gear on a cheaper plane, struggling with unusual transmitter controls, then trying a camera arrangement that ended in a collision with a tree. The notes preserve the model names, frustrations, damaged tails, and temporary repairs rather than pretending every iteration succeeded.

A different branch leads to a free fiction book posted at the end of 2005. Another discusses environmentally efficient technology, including absorption refrigeration. There is also a section about microcomputers and the author's working life.

Nothing forces these interests into one brand identity. The common theme is simply the person maintaining the pages.

Some of the linked photographs and video files may be less reliable than the readable text. Even so, the surviving details offer a snapshot of experiments, travel, self-publication, and practical engineering interests that a short social-media biography would struggle to represent.

A personal website could be a place to file everything one made, attempted, or hoped to finish. Matejowsky's remained exactly that.

Explore the original homepage and the 2005 aerial-photography log.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.