Ancient Web: Miles Fortis Froze Its Gun Writing at 2004

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The most important sentence on Milesfortis.us is a notice that the site will not receive new articles. Everything here, it says, was on Milesfortis.com by 2004.

Visit the Miles Fortis archive

The welcome page identifies itself as an archive, not a new installment of its companion site. Its links lead to named collections: the A. K. Church Institute, Theoretical Cybercide Foundation, Mike Cumpston, B&J G&A, and guest contributions. The page retains an emphatic September 11 remembrance and a final update timestamp of January 28, 2017.

That is an unusually clear arrangement for an old personal website. Rather than silently replacing the work or burying it beneath fresh posts, the maintainer separated the old material and gave it a date boundary.

One surviving section, A. K. Church's cyberhome, introduces itself as a place for esoteric articles. Church thanks Miles Fortis for the hosting bandwidth, invites mail, and immediately warns that he cannot appraise a reader's gun. It is a contributor page rather than an institutional publication.

A technical hobby written in first person

Church's index sorts material into rifles, handguns, shotguns, combination guns, and miscellaneous pieces. Subjects range from Harrington & Richardson's Handi-Rifle and an old farm gun to revolvers, military-surplus pistols, and a Springfield Armory combination firearm.

Some link titles announce later additions: an article revisited, an exploded parts diagram, a reader's correspondence, an ammunition warning. The index preserves the habit of revising a specific piece instead of pretending that a printed opinion must stay unchanged forever.

The surrounding photographs and the heading Codex Armae give the section the feel of somebody's painstakingly labeled workshop notebook. It asks for credit when material is quoted, another small trace of independently hosted specialist publishing.

This is historical reading, not contemporary firearm-buying or safety guidance; old specifications and cautions need modern verification before any practical use. The archive's value is in the contributors' voices and the record of what they chose to document.

Many websites try to look perpetually current. Miles Fortis does something rarer: it tells you where the past ends, and then lets the past remain.

Browse the archived contributor indexes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.