Ancient Web: Jim Rees Made His 1993 Homepage an Anti-Platform

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Jim Rees's website contains a statement that now reads like a manifesto: there are no cookies, captchas, privacy agreements, popups, or affiliate links, because the website does not need any of them.

Visit Jim Rees's personal homepage

Rees writes that his first Usenet post was in 1982, that his name appeared on an Internet RFC in January 1983, and that he created his first webpage in June 1993. He remembers attending a TCP/IP vendors workshop in August 1986, before the name Interop became familiar. These are first-person claims, supported within the page by links to the relevant RFC and workshop history.

Rees even quotes a June 1999 Ann Arbor Observer assessment of his website, placing the personal homepage in the period when local newspapers considered an individual website noteworthy.

A directory that refuses to become a feed

The travel index is enormous. It groups journeys by country and region rather than blending them into chronological social posts. Visits include India in spring 1989, Australia in October 1989, China in June 1997, and Italy in 2001, alongside later trips as recent as 2026.

Those dates identify the trips, not necessarily the publication date of every photograph. That distinction matters when old memories are carried forward on a maintained domain.

Other navigation on the homepage points to culture, local material about Ann Arbor, and the University of Michigan CITI research group. The broader site is both a personal scrapbook and a collection of the fields Rees helped inhabit.

Its visible design is deliberately light. A modest search box, a couple of images, and plain links suffice. Rees says the web host does log requests but that he has not inspected the logs in years. The site's decision not to track visitors is a present policy statement from its owner, not a security audit.

In a sense this page is more historically interesting because it remains alive. Rees can add a new travel entry while keeping a structure a 1990s browser user would recognize instantly.

The early Web promised that ordinary people could publish without asking permission. The first-wave participants who still maintain that arrangement are living examples of the promise.

Browse the personal homepage and the geographically organized travel journals.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.