Ancient Web: Star Trek WWW Saved Old Fan Links and Cold War Essays

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Star Trek WWW calls itself 'the mother of all Star Trek sites' and says it has been online since 1994. Its front page offers more graphics than readable text, but at least some of the material behind that old entrance is still there.

Visit Star Trek WWW.

The landing page bears a June 27, 2001 last-update date and a copyright range beginning in 1994. Its design consists of an image-led navigation system rather than a modern text-first index. The site's self-description is a period boast, not an independently established ranking among Trek archives.

A contemporary GeoCities-era Star Trek links collection describes STWWW as a large Star Trek links page. That provides evidence of how other fan webmasters used it: not simply as a page to read, but as a doorway to other people's fan sites.

A television show becomes an essay subject

One useful surviving interior document is Cold War Images and the Enemies of Star Trek, credited to Aaron Angel with HTML formatting by Luca Sambucci. It is a lengthy research-style essay, complete with bibliography and dozens of endnotes, examining whether original-series Klingons reflected American images of the Soviet Union and Romulans were compared with China.

The argument draws on television episodes, novels, histories of the Cold War, and sources including Star Trek VI. Its author treats Federation, Klingon, and Romulan institutions almost as political case studies. Some analogies are sweeping and some assertions about fictional governments or historical peoples are questionable; this is a preserved interpretation, not a definitive account of either Cold War history or official Trek continuity.

The bibliography is especially revealing. A fan essay in the early web era might cite Diane Duane's novels, John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, university-style historical books, and individual television episodes in the same document. It was possible to build a small humanities seminar around a television franchise with nothing more elaborate than HTML and footnotes.

Many of the image-map destinations are not reliably readable now, so the full size of the original resource cannot be determined from the surviving pages. The remaining homepage and essay nonetheless illustrate two sides of 1990s fandom: gigantic networks of personal links and unexpectedly serious long-form analysis.

Browse the historic front page and read the surviving Cold War essay.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.