Ancient Web: Rat Haus Reality Built a 1995 Library Around Jumpdoors

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most websites invite readers to follow links. Rat Haus Reality calls those links jumpdoors and provides a guide to the building's corridors, branches and filing system.

Enter Rat Haus Reality.

The site's introduction for first-time visitors says the project began on the September equinox in 1995. Its editor, David T. Ratcliffe, envisioned an electronic library for material he believed deserved wider attention: political commentary, antiwar writing, environmental issues, alternative histories and advocacy documents.

An unusual amount of effort went into navigation. Ratcliffe describes a hierarchical tree with a root directory and increasingly specific branches, plus a card catalogue indexed by title, author, type, date and request counts. Visitors can translate the site's vocabulary: jumpdoors are links, ratitor means editor, and limelight means highlighted material.

A library designed for slower modems

The welcome guide explains that lightweight pages were a deliberate choice, so readers with older computers and limited connections could reach the text. Individual documents could have HTML, plain ASCII, PDF or PostScript versions. Text-only editions were useful for email and slow access, not merely a stylistic affectation.

Ratcliffe explains why the word jumpdoor appealed to him: in Frank Herbert's fiction it means passage between places without traversing the intervening space. A hyperlink performs a similar trick for a reader moving through a library.

The site's personal origin essay, copyrighted 1997, reaches further back. It tells of a childhood fascination with rats, an actual small wooden rat house, publishing experiments and a personal vocabulary becoming the identity of a website.

Many materials on the site present contentious political interpretations, including claims about covert activity and historical assassinations. Their presence in the archive is not independent confirmation of their conclusions. They are best read with attention to authorship, evidence, date and competing historical research.

Rat Haus Reality is still updated, so its homepage contains recent political material alongside documents from decades earlier. What qualifies it for Ancient Web is its surviving 1990s publishing history and site architecture: one editor making a low-bandwidth public library with names for every shelf.

Follow the first-time visitor's guide and hierarchical index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.