Aardvark Daily

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Thirty years this month

When I started Aardvark back in 1995 I would never have guessed that 30 years later I'd still be hammering away at a keyboard and updating the site on a daily basis.

But here I am at 1:30am writing yet another edition of your daily dose and I beg you to excuse my slurred typing, thanks to Parkinson's I've now been 26 hours without sleep so the grey-matter is running a bit slow at the moment.

Where have the years gone?

I fondly recall those very early days of the internet when my ISP was iProlink and Actrix gave me free hosting on their servers for Aardvark.

Sadly, many of the very early columns have long since vanished from the face of the interwebs but there's still a huge amount of stuff archived on the site to this day.

For those who haven't noticed, you can access older columns using the format aardvark.co.nz/daily/yyyy/mmdd.shtml and some old news stories can be found using the format aardvark.co.nz/nX.htm (where X is a number from 1 to over 100 or so)

When Aardvark first kicked off it was almost entirely about the local internet scene... which was very small in 1995.

Just about everyone knew everyone so it was a tight-knit community of like-minded folk who hand-coded webpages and set up their own websites, often for nothing more than the joy of doing so.

Of course the web was a vastly different place back then, especially since things such as cascading style sheets and other "advanced" formatting features were markedly absent. Hell, we didn't even have frames way back then so websites tended to be pretty bland and limited.

Another hurdle to creativity and complexity was the fact that we were all using dial-up modems at 14.4Kbps. This meant that the loading time for webpages could be inordinately long if you dared to use too many graphics or complicated formatting. In fact, most hard-core web users turned off the graphics (you could do that) by default and only loaded them if they were essential to the content or navigation.

Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice of course.

Most ISPs were small operations back then, just a few employees and racks of modems were the norm.

Virtually all of them charged by the megabyte of data transferred and it wasn't cheap. I recall paying $10 per MB for my access but fortunately, given the slow speed of the modems and simple graphics-limited nature of most webpages, a megabyte would last quite a while.

The ISP IHUG broke new ground by offering "flat rate" access for a fixed monthly fee and with that proposition they grew into a major force in the market. They also offered a satellite downlink that boosted downloads to a much faster rate than dial-up modems could offer.

In 1996, NZ's largest telco (Telecom) got into the business and also began to offer access on an hourly-rate basis rather than on a bytes-transferred one.

One day soon I will sit down and run some AI on the entire Aardvark archive so that its contents will be more accessible. For some reason, Google hasn't bothered to regularly crawl the site so it only has a tiny number of references compared to the actual number of pages.

As far as I can tell, Aardvark is one of the longest-running blogs on the web, although it was started long before the term "blog" was a thing. Some quick research indicates that The Daily Illuminator may have beaten me by a few months -- damn!

For 30 years this column has been a labour of love and a part of my week-daily routine. To be honest, I can't see that changing... ever. Only some major health problem or the eventual big dirt-nap will see me stop spilling my guts through my keyboard every monday through friday.

The best part of all this is that there are still people who read what I write and, even better, still people who email me with their thoughts, opinions criticisms and bouquets. I actually get quite a surprise when I check the stats and see just how many people do visit every day and a small but important percentage of those have been here almost since that first edition.

To all those who do spend a few minutes a day I thank you. I'd still do this even if nobody was reading but it's nice to know that some folk still find what I write to be interesting, relevant or perhaps just a useful distraction.

Stay tuned, the first 30 years are done, now for the next 30 years!

Carpe Diem folks!

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