Ancient Web: Kris Stewart's Home Server Kept 1990s Internet History Personal

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Kris Stewart's website still introduces itself as a 'WWW Server.' It sounds more like the name of a machine down the hall than the title of a personal brand, and that is exactly the right mood.

Visit Kris Stewart's SDSU homepage.

Stewart retired in 2013 after a long career in computer science at San Diego State University. Her homepage is a dense scrapbook of internet history, supercomputing education, mathematical software, personal timelines, science outreach, Disney history, and Eric Clapton concert notes. The page was modified in July 2026, but much of what it preserves begins decades earlier.

One cluster of links leads to teaching materials and historical records from the San Diego Supercomputer Center and its 1985–2010 evolution. Another documents a 1997 Supercomputing conference's presentation on the history of the internet from 1962 to 1992.

The web as a professor's filing cabinet

The site links Stewart's professional chronology, her publications and grants from 1984 to 2013, and the courses she taught. Those include compiler construction, supercomputing for the sciences, data structures, 3D game programming, and courses on computing's social and ethical implications.

Most relevant to the site's survival is the personal Edcenter archive, which the homepage dates from October 1997 to December 2004. It also maintains links to archived materials from the Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program, which Stewart says she coordinated in the 1990s. The current site explicitly points readers toward the Internet Archive for several of those historical projects.

A wonderfully archaic extra is a transfer-time calculator, a reminder that planning around modem or network speed was once part of everyday web use. These small utilities belong beside professional histories because they were both useful to the same people.

The server does not segregate professional history from private enthusiasms. Concert setlists and Disneyland visits coexist with computing timelines, early internet references, and teaching exercises. That mixture is how faculty homepages often worked: the person owned the structure, so the archive reflected the person.

Not every older link necessarily still works, and archived pages should be distinguished from the current server. The historical accomplishment is the persistence of a readable human-curated map through decades of university web changes.

Browse the SDSU server and its internet-history materials.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.