Ancient Web: Phone-Man Answered GeoCities-Era Wiring Questions

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

In 1997, having a second telephone line was a household improvement worth explaining with diagrams. Keith A. Michal made an entire website for the job.

Visit Phone-Man's Home Phone Wiring Advice Page

Michal's homepage provides guides for adding telephone jacks, wiring second and third lines, understanding cable colors, installing DSL splitters, and dealing with the telephone network interface at a house. Its navigation still separates practical topics into tiny dedicated HTML pages instead of asking visitors to watch one giant instructional video.

The site's own history says Michal began the project while working for Bell Atlantic, predecessor of part of Verizon. People asked him basic telephone-wiring questions while he was on other jobs. A website address on a card made it possible to give them an answer without repeating the same explanation all day.

For a few years the advice lived at GeoCities addresses, including SiliconValley/Pines/4116 and phone-man.geo. The old hosting names survive right on the homepage.

When bandwidth made a free homepage expensive

Michal reports that the advice page ran as a free, noncommercial site from 1997 to 2003. In 2002, traffic began exceeding the limits of GeoCities' free hosting, so he registered HomePhoneWiring.com and moved to paid hosting.

The visitor counts are an unusually concrete record. The homepage says its old counter logged more than 454,000 visits from May 1997 to June 2002, then more than 1,137,000 visits from June 2002 to January 2006. These are site-reported figures, counted by services with different methods, not verified unique-reader statistics.

The site also includes caution notices and pages asking why its design still looks old. The answer is visible everywhere: links to one topic at a time, plain illustrations, colored labels, and a long-lived preference for making material easy to find.

Some linked inner pages were not retrievable by the research reader during this review; their presence in the navigation is verified, not a guarantee that every instruction remains available or technically current. Electrical and communications wiring standards can change, and historical advice is not a substitute for checking current codes.

The larger historical point is clear. When ordinary homes had multiple landlines and dial-up modems, someone with real field experience could turn repetitive questions into a reference book anybody could bookmark.

Explore the original Phone-Man homepage and its account of moving beyond GeoCities.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.