Ancient Web: Greg Alexander Kept a Working Archive of His Computers

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A personal homepage can be a portrait without ever arranging its creator's life into neat categories. Greg Alexander's is an engineer's filing cabinet: computers, bicycles, programming projects, jokes, arguments, and machines that worked well enough to deserve documentation.

Visit Greg Alexander's homepage.

The index begins with a personal disclaimer about opinions and then goes straight into lists. Its laptop section documents an Averatec used from 2003 to 2005, an Apple iBook from 2005 to 2010, successive Chromebooks, and more recent machines. That sequence is valuable precisely because it is one user's record of everyday hardware across changing platforms.

The small projects are the interesting ones

Alexander provides bare-metal introductions for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 and STM32 microcontrollers. A software list links a Befunge development environment for Android, a Reverse Polish Notation calculator, a musical tuning tool, and a project called TunerTime. There are notes on decoding the serial protocol of an old graphics tablet and experiences with phone operating systems that rarely receive long-term archival care.

One odd surviving artifact is a 2001 wearable-computer photo collection, linked right from the homepage. Nearby are a short story dated 1997 and a dancing beer-can project from 2004. These entries turn the page into a timeline of personal creativity rather than a strictly technical portfolio.

The index also holds reviews of bicycles and accessories, descriptions of 3D printers, a guitar-chord reference, and memories of old computing platforms. Its organization reflects the author's changing interests without deleting earlier ones for the sake of brand consistency.

There are sharp political remarks and irreverent jokes toward the bottom. They are Alexander's own editorial statements; their presence is not evidence about the subjects of those claims. Other links lead to copies of historical documents and technical material with independent copyright or attribution considerations.

Unlike a simple abandoned homepage, this site has clearly been revised repeatedly. Yet its presentation remains an old-fashioned list of descriptive text links, rich with side paths and dates. It is less like a social profile than a table of contents for an idiosyncratic lifetime of tinkering.

The web is often said to have erased old personal journals. In this case, it became the journal's filing system.

Explore the laptop histories and engineering-project links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.