Ancient Web: Kicker Vallas Left His 1996 Online Persona Standing
Horace 'Kicker' Vallas's retiring personal homepage remains a scrapbook of early Internet projects, old pet pages, guitar recordings, and the identity attached to hav.com since 1996.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
Many old personal websites disappear when their owners retire. Horace 'Kicker' Vallas seems to have decided retirement was a perfectly reasonable reason to leave the homepage up.
The site's opening message is straightforward: he's retired. But the rest reads like a very particular farewell to decades of do-it-yourself Internet life. Vallas says he had more than 45 years in software, spent the last 28 years doing Internet-related work, and has used hav.com as his online persona since 1996.
That phrasing matters. A domain was not just an address for a company or service; it was how one person could be recognized across changing networks. Vallas even discusses offers to buy the short domain, making clear that its value to him is bound up with those years of identity.
A last look around the workshop
The homepage is still furnished with personal odds and ends. There are photos of Vallas, old family and pet images, and references to the Web pages he once made for dogs named Kick-kick and Bear. Links to archived versions of those animal pages remain on the homepage, even though the original pages are no longer presented as active sites.
He names TennisPensacola as the most fun of his Internet ventures, noting that he took it down when shutting down his server and pointing readers to a Wayback copy. Another long-running project, BackBeNimble, is described as a site he took over around 1995 or 1996 and repeatedly rebuilt. These are recollections from the site's creator, not independently audited project timelines.
An improbable second half of the page becomes a guitar recital. Vallas introduces recordings as modest webcam-era practice videos, mentioning an eight-bit mono webcam and advising visitors to use proper speakers. Pieces by Barrios, Satie, Cardoso, and others are listed among the clips.
The result is messy in exactly the way personal pages often were: a professional history, pets, a sale notice, old hyperlinks, health-product enthusiasm, and guitar music all sharing one home.
The site is not a complete archive of his previous projects. It is more like the last open door to a workshop after the owner has put down the tools.
Read Kicker's retirement homepage and follow its historical links.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #Internet History, #ancientweb, #webhistory, #homepages, #personal-web