About Author

A Photo of Me     Perhaps you're wondering who created this site. Well, for starters, my name is Chuck Lau, and I've been in web development since the Summer of 1994. That's eternity in Internet time.

    Most of my early work was directed towards Mosaic. (Netscape had not burst on the scene yet.) Back in those days, most people created their web sites on SPARCstations in the corner of some dusty UNIX lab - which is where I started, too. Back in those pre-Netscape days, NCSA and JPL owned the hottest web sites and people used the word "Mosaic" interchangeably with "Internet" or "World Wide Web." Little did we know that all hell would break loose with the release of Mosaic NetScape in October 1994.

    I still remember hearing the rumors and rumbles weeks before Mosaic NetScape's release. People touted two big things back then, both of which people have long forgotten about. First, Mosaic NetScape was "wicked fast" over 14.4 modems since you could actually read a web page you loaded before all the images had finished downloading. Second, NetScape permitted web designers to turn off those big blue boxes around every "hotlinked" image - something that has done more for the aesthetics of design on the Net than anything else.

    For the first eighteen months after the release of Mosaic NetScape 0.9, we were in a mad dash. Back then, Netscape was introducing something earthshattering in terms of web development every few weeks - tables, background images, client-side image mapping, CGI pushes, framing, LiveScript... We were so caught up in learning how to use these empowering new tools that no one gave any thought about preserving the past. We were so quick at improving and overwriting anything old that once the dust settled, we realized that a lot of the history of the Net was quite literally gone.

    Recently, I was sifting through a browser cache I accidently backed up a few years ago - only to rediscover wonderous web pages which only existed in my memories. Carefully going through a few other old browser caches, and with the help of a few old Netscapees, I have begun a project in web archaeology - rediscovering and preserving artifacts of an important time in the development of human communications. I urge you to do the same - and if you turn up something cool, by all means let me know about it!