Ancient Web: Kids' Space Brought Children Online in 1995

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

In 1995, a children's website was not necessarily a cartoon advertising campaign. Sometimes it was a place where children could make stories, send drawings, and meet a classroom on the other side of the world.

Explore the preserved Kids' Space history

Sachiko Oba-Cote, then a graduate student at Columbia University Teachers College, dates the creation of Kids' Space to March 3, 1995. Its surviving retrospective says that by June of that year children from more than 80 countries were participating in creative learning activities, supported by parent, teacher, and volunteer helpers. Those are the founder's reported figures.

An especially fine artifact is the April 28, 1995 email from Interport Communications. The ISP's technical staff offered a simpler web address, working image maps, and submission forms. These sound modest now, but in the year of 14.4-kilobit modems they were the infrastructure needed to let a young participant send something to a website and know it had arrived.

Drawing became international correspondence

The retrospective describes children contributing writing, pictures, music, and collaborative picture books. Schools arranged cross-border exchanges and projects such as Global Story Train, in which students contributed illustrated cars to a shared imaginary train. Another project, Voice for the Earth, passed messages about peace between participating schools.

After September 11, 2001, the site hosted Letters to NYC Children, a forum for messages when usual communications were disrupted. It eventually operated Kids' Space Connection, a more restricted messaging environment intended to make participation safer for young users. The project's own history reports involvement by more than 30,000 children and parents and 6,000 teachers in that network.

Kids' Space became a nonprofit foundation in 2000. Its founder says the financial crisis of 2008 depleted support and the original international project and messaging system closed in 2010.

The current pages function as a retrospective and gateway to archived captures, not a working children's social network. They warn that old submission forms, databases, and Flash content may not work; the site has also been intermittently inaccessible in contemporary browsers.

Its preservation value is enormous. At a time when online childhood is often described chiefly in terms of entertainment and risk, this archive documents an early attempt to use the Web for supervised, noncommercial collaboration across national boundaries.

Read the 1995 hosting letter and the founder's retrospective.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.