The eWebs.net Memorial Museum of Early-Web Hosting

The Rotunda

The Storefront, Reassembled

The museum's centerpiece: oldindex.html, the firm's homepage as Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 shipped it — running live in the case below. Fifteen header slices, eleven spacer GIFs, four hand-cranked rollover buttons, and one paragraph of confidence, exactly as served. Hover the buttons; they still work. Please do not lean on the glass.

The eWebs.net team gathered around a single keyboard

is an accomplished web design and development firm that builds exceptional advertising, sales-oriented and database-driven web sites for clients throughout North America. We excel in the ability to design, produce and manage web sites!

eCommerce Total Package advertisement — click to visit the Hall of Commerce

Working exhibit · scroll sideways on small screens · buttons wired to the museum map for your safety

“eWebs.net,Inc. is the fastest-growing web host in the world!”

web_hosting.htm, verbatim, punctuation as found

Wing I

The FrontPage Gallery

How the storefront upstairs was made: Microsoft FrontPage 4.0, Photoshop slices, and a 15-cell table held together by 1-pixel spacer GIFs and hope. The museum displays the anatomy so the visitor may appreciate the taxidermy.

The Fifteen-Slice Header

The blue chrome banner in the Rotunda is not one image. It is fifteen, named top_01 through top_15, cut by Adobe ImageReady from top.psd and reassembled in a nested table whose colspan arithmetic must balance like a checkbook. Two representative slices are shown below, exhibited apart from their siblings for study.

Accessions 2003.822.014–021 · _borders/images/top/*.gif · the spacer.gif is 1×1 px and appears eleven times per page load

The _vti_cnf Reliquary

FrontPage shadowed every file with a hidden twin in a _vti_cnf directory — 154 such artifacts were counted in the excavation, none removed. Even bandphotos.zip (Wing VII) has one.

ProgId: FrontPage.Editor.Document · Microsoft Border: tl

Manuscript: the preload incantation

function newImage(arg) { if (document.images) { rslt = new Image(); rslt.src = arg; return rslt; } } var preloadFlag = false; function preloadImages() { if (document.images) { webdesign_over = newImage("images/leftnav/webdesign-over.gif"); webhosting_over = newImage("images/leftnav/webhosting-over.gif"); clients_over = newImage("images/leftnav/clients-over.gif"); contact_over = newImage("images/leftnav/contact-over.gif"); preloadFlag = true; } }

Before CSS could swap a background image, rollovers were hand-cranked. Four hover states were downloaded in advance so the buttons would not flicker on a dial-up line. The Rotunda storefront runs this exact code today; conservators have declined to modernize it on ethical grounds.

Accession 2003.822.009 · oldindex.html, lines 12–41 · running unmodified since 1999

Wing II

The Hall of Commerce

Recovered intact from rates.htm: the firm's complete 2001 price architecture. The visitor is invited to reflect that Package E — thirty HTML pages — cost $7,000, and that this museum contains more pages than that.

Package A

personal homepage or small presence

two html pages
three supplied images
custom graphics
e-mail address

$250

Package B

small business homepage

five html pages
five supplied images
custom graphics
top 15 search engines

$1,200

Package C

midsize business site

ten html pages
ten supplied images
custom graphics
top 15 search engines

$2,400

Package D

large business site

twenty html pages
twenty supplied images
custom graphics
top 300 search engines

$4,600

Package E

very large business site

thirty html pages
thirty supplied images
custom graphics
800 search engines

$7,000

À la carte — as posted, 2001
Domain name registration (two years; $35 each additional)	$70
Domain name setup on our server	$100
Virtual hosting (your site at www.ewebs.net/yourcompany)	$50
HTML page design	$85 / hr
Scanned images	$10 each
OCR’d pages	$10 / page
Animated graphics (“objects that move to draw attention”)	$85 / hr
RealAudio sound (welcomes, greetings, music online)	$50 / min
Motion video online	$175 / min
FLASH / Shockwave design	$100 / hr
C, C++, Java programming	$100 / hr
Perl & JavaScript (“powerful scripting language for dynamic content”)	$100 / hr

Monthly Hosting, Package 1

30 MB of space. FrontPage Server Extensions. Unlimited POP e-mail. Unlimited hits, transfers, traffic. Your own CGI-BIN. Detailed statistics — “This is REALLY powerful, shows you how many hits each page is getting, where they are coming from and a lot more.”

$35 a month. Package 2 doubled you to 75 MB for $60 and re-registered your site with the search engines every single month, a service search engines specifically asked people to stop doing.

For calibration: this museum page is heavier than an entire Package 1 allocation would allow, and it is hosted for $0.

Accession 2003.822.030 · rates.htm · 31 KB of nested table markup

Curator’s note on pricing philosophy

“You can find cheaper prices, but would you let your 12-year-old nephew design your annual report or your product brochure?”

rates.htm, unedited. The nephew is now roughly 37 and works in DevOps.

Purple eCommerce Total Package advertisement offering Internet Store, The Amazing Buy_Me Button, and Cyber Circular, all three amazing products for $49.95 per month, with a Demo Us! button — eCommerce Total Package (purple state)

Internet Store. *The Amazing Buy_Me Button.* Cyber Circular. All three amazing products, one low price: $49.95 per month. The underscore in Buy_Me was load-bearing.

Accession 2003.822.038 · images/top.gif

Green variant of the eCommerce Total Package advertisement, adding EZ Payment Gateway for $39.95 with a Check me out button — eCommerce Total Package (green state, expanded)

A later revision adds the *EZ Payment Gateway* at $39.95 (“Check me out”). Scholars disagree on whether green or purple came first; the file dates are identical to the second.

Accession 2003.822.039 · images/ecommerce.gif

Wing III

The Server Room: a Cobalt RaQ Liturgy

From serversetup.htm: “HOW TO ADD A NEW DOMAIN TO YOUR SERVER,” a 22-step illustrated rite for the firm's Cobalt server — screenshotted step by step in Internet Explorer 5 at ns1.ewebs.net:81, complete with A records, reverse-DNS checkboxes, and a /24 that must become a /26 for reasons the liturgy does not explain. Every surviving screenshot is displayed. One is lost.

Internet Explorer 5 showing the Cobalt Server Management screen at ns1.ewebs.net, with a Virtual Site List of client hostnames and IP addresses in the 198.78.174 range — Step 1
Type www.yoursitehere.com/admin. Enter your Master Username and Password. Click “Control Panel.”

Cobalt control panel: Parameters button beside Domain Name Service (DNS) Server — Step 2
Click “Parameters” next to “Domain Name Service (DNS) Server.”

Screenshot 3.gif — lost to history. The liturgy continues without it.

Step 3

Select “Address (A) Record” from the “Add...” drop-down menu.

DNS record form: domain name and IP address fields with Automatic Reverse Address Record Generation checked — Step 4
Type the domain and the IP. Make sure “Automatic Reverse Address Record Generation” is checked. “Update List.”

DNS list with a green pencil edit button next to an IP address ending in /24 — Step 5
Select the GREEN button with the pencil next to the IP with the /24 at the end. (This is the edit button.)

Network mask dropdown changed from 24 to 26 — Step 6
Change the 24 to 26 under the “Network Mask” dropdown. Then click “update list.”

Add menu open again on Address (A) Record — Step 7
Select “Address (A) Record” from the “Add...” menu, again.

Hostname field containing www; reverse generation unchecked — Step 8
Add “www” under Hostname. This time UNCHECK “Automatic Reverse Address Record Generation.”

Add menu open on Mail Server (MX) Record — Step 9
Select “Mail Server (Mx) Record” from the “Add...” menu.

MX record form with domain and mail server name fields — Step 10
Domain name: yourdomain.com. Mail Server Name: yourdomain.com. Click on “Upate List.” *[sic]*

Add menu open on Mail Server (MX) Record a second time — Step 11
“Mail Server (Mx) Record” from the “Add...” menu, a second time.

MX record dialog, second pass — Step 12
The second MX, for the www host.

Form with www hostname, domain name, and mail server fields filled — Step 13
www next to Hostname; yourdomain.com next to Domain name and Mail Server Name. “Upate List” once more.

Save Changes To DNS Server button — Step 14
Click “Save Changes To DNS Server.”

Save Changes or Site Management screen — Step 15
Click “Save Changes” or “Site Management.”

Add Virtual Site button on the Site Management screen — Step 16
Click “Add Virtual Site.”

New virtual site form: IP address, www hostname, domain name, Confirm New Site — Step 17
IP address, “www,” domain name. “Confirm New Site.”

Virtual site list showing a green edit button and an orange trash button beside each domain — Step 18
Find your domain and select the Green Edit button next to it.

Add User button on the site configuration screen — Step 19
Click “Add User.”

User form: full name, username, password twice, Site administrator and Enable FrontPage user web checkboxes, email aliases box — Step 20
Full name, username (“Must be the only one on the server”), password twice. Check “Enable FrontPage user web” if you want FrontPage access. Make sure you hit enter after each alias.

Blue mail button next to the user in the user list — Step 21
Click the Blue Mail button next to the user. The @www account MUST always be the account on the bottom for it to work.

Email forwarding screen with Save Changes button — Step 22
Add the forwarding address, “Save Changes.” **Your new domain name has now been added to the server!**

The one warning in the entire document — step 18, capitalization original

“NOT THE ORANGE TRASH BUTTON — THIS WILL DELETE THE DOMAIN”

Twenty-five years later, the museum's parent project operates under the same policy.

Accession 2003.822.070 · serversetup.htm + images/serversetup/1–22.gif (3.gif never uploaded) · visible in step 1: real client hostnames on ns1.ewebs.net, 198.78.174.0/26 · the Cobalt RaQ line was discontinued in 2003, taking its green pencil with it

Wing IV

The Pavilion of Dead Technologies

Every specimen below was found alive in this docroot. All are now extinct in the wild. Please do not tap on the plugins.

RealNames · 1996 – 2002

The Keyword Resolver

A scheme to replace URLs with paid “Internet Keywords.” ewebs.net embedded this affiliate search box (provider ID 1102758) pointing at navigation.us.realnames.com/resolver.dll. RealNames died in May 2002 when Microsoft declined to renew; the box has resolved nothing for twenty-four years. Reproduction below, permanently disabled.

Accession 2003.822.044 · realnames.htm

RealPlayer 8 · fl. 2000

Streaming Video, Three Bitrates

The video page offered work for radio station 92 KISS FM in 56k Low Quality, 56k High Quality, and T1, ISDN, DSL High Quality — plus one QuickTime .mov for the aristocracy. Visitors were first directed to “Click Here to Get RealPlayer 8,” beginning a relationship with pop-up renewal notices that outlived the station’s format.

Accession 2003.822.046 · video.html

FrontPage Server Extensions · 1996 – 2006

The Publishing Rite

Sold as a hosting feature in every package. The docroot retains its ritual objects: _vti_cnf shadow-directories beside every file, _borders/, and postinfo.html, which explains the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard to nobody.

Accessions various · 154 _vti_ artifacts counted, none removed

Miva, ColdFusion, Apache::ASP · fl. 2003

The Test-Page Catacomb

Under test.old/, the panel auto-generated capability shrines for nine server technologies: apacheasp, cgi, coldfusion, fcgi, miva, perl, php, python, ssi. The Miva page survives to certify a “possibility to get the extension environment settings” that no one ever checked.

Accessions 2009.1021.* · test.old/*/test.html

Windows Media Video 8 · fl. 2003

The .WMV Vault

Two reels survive: longvideo_01.wmv (1:44, a stage-magic performance) and interlake.wmv (14:50 of steel-processing machinery at 320×240, encoded with WMFSDK 8.20). Both have now been restored from Windows Media 8 and are screening continuously in Wing VIII. The originals remain in the vault, un-deleted, as is museum policy.

Accessions 2003.822.051–052 · restored 2026

The Webalizer & AWStats · 2001 – 2009

Attendance Records

Monthly visitor ledgers survive continuously from March 2001 to October 2009 — six years past the site’s own death. The server kept counting after everyone went home, which is the most early-web fact in this museum.

stats/usage_2001*–2002*, cgi-bin/awstats*2003–2009 · 234 files

Wing V

The Browser Bestiary

From the AWStats icon collection shipped with the site’s statistics package: the fauna a webmaster of 2003 was prepared to encounter, pinned at their original 20 pixels. Status assessed 2026.

Netscapeextinct 2008

Internet Explorerextinct 2022

Lynxstill alive

Operareincarnated

WebTVextinct 2013

Dreamcastextinct 2003

iCabstill alive

Konquerorendangered

Amayaextinct 2012

Galeonextinct 2008

OmniWebextinct 2012

NetPositivedied with BeOS

IBrowseAmiga, alive

StarOfficeextinct 2011

Go!Zilladownload manager

WebCopiersite ripper

BeOSextinct 2001

OS/2extinct 2006

AmigaOSimmortal

CP/Malready extinct then

NeXTSTEPbecame macOS

Windows 98extinct 2006

Windows MEmercy, 2006

WebTV OSextinct 2013

Accessions 2003.822.icon.* · icon/browser/, icon/os/ · 343 icons held, 24 displayed. The collection also includes 250 national flags and nine CPU manufacturer badges, available to researchers by appointment.

Wing VI

The Client Wall

Transcribed from clients.htm without alteration, including the load-bearing parenthetical. Condition of each site surveyed July 2026. Two entries remain clickable — the museum encourages the visitor to try them and see where a quarter-century of uptime leads.

www.rollingstone.com still standing
www.tunes.com gone
“(webcasting only for the above sites)” — sic
www.american-av.com changed hands
www.starop.com gone
www.cordley-temprite.com gone
www.ginkgoint.com gone
www.bsvp.com alive — still answering, 25 years on
www.allcosales.com gone
www.fenderanddonisch.com gone
www.zerogravityclub.com gone
www.chezaday.com see curator’s note
www.ivavideo.com gone
www.mestudios.com changed hands
www.randallstudio.com gone
www.clubvortex.com gone

Curator’s note: the mis-wired anchor

In the original 2001 HTML, the link whose text reads www.chezaday.com does not point to chezaday.com. Its href is http://www.prestoproductions.com — a paste error that sat unnoticed in the markup for twenty-five years. The museum preserves the fault exactly as found: click the chezaday entry above and you will arrive, as every 2001 visitor would have, at Presto Productions — which, unlike most of this wall, is still in business. So is bsvp.com. Some client relationships outlive the firm, the CMS, the format war, and arguably the point.

clients.htm, line 74 · both destinations verified live, 2026

Wing VII · The Print Room

The Family Band: The Ways of Living

On the afternoon of January 10, 2003, someone at the firm fed a stack of 1960s photographs through a scanner, zipped them into bandphotos.zip, left the file in the root of the company docroot, and linked it from nowhere. A web server, it turns out, is where a family keeps things. All ten prints are displayed below — the museum's most valuable holding and its least explicable.

The band's printed promotional card: a blue duotone photograph of five young men posed around an ornate stone monument among trees, with the names Keith, Bob, Ron, Jim, Joe in script beneath, then THE WAYS OF LIVING, DOWNERS GROVE, ILLINOIS, and a management credit for Jim McDermott in the corner, the card taped at all four edges — The promotional card · band_003 · full scan, 2504×3270 →

Keith · Bob · Ron · Jim · Joe

The largest scan in the zip — 2504 by 3270 pixels, the one the scanner operator lingered over — is the band’s own promotional card, taped at the corners from decades on somebody’s wall. It is how the collection identifies itself: The Ways of Living, of Downers Grove, Illinois, managed by a Jim McDermott and reachable at exchange-name phone numbers that have not rung as dialed since area codes grew a third digit.

Downers Grove is also where ewebs.net hung its shingle thirty years later, and the Jim of the card is the family’s own: the same Jim Mulvey whose name appears on the Hilton Head annex in Wing VIII and whose firm ran the server this zip was found on. The band on the card is the house band of the family that built the host — scanned onto company hardware one January afternoon, and thereby accidentally preserved for this museum.

The prints run from a four-piece in matching red shirts (the drum head bears an earlier, half-legible name) through backyard shows, a packed gym dance, and a gold brocade jacket under a lodge ceiling. Nothing here was retouched; every crease, tape mark, and thumbprint ships at full scanned resolution.

Enter the full gallery — all ten prints, annotated →

Small color print, corners clipped: four young men in matching dark red shirts and black slacks stand behind a drum kit, three electric guitars propped against it, the drum head hand-lettered with an earlier band name now worn illegible — The earlier band, name worn off the drum head · full scan →

Black-and-white photograph of five boys in ties sitting in a row on a metal railing at night, one cradling a guitar, the print heavily creased — Five on a railing, after dark · full scan →

Black-and-white photograph from a balcony of a packed high-school gymnasium dance, HOME and VISITOR scoreboard on the wall, the band playing on a low stage at left over a dense crowd in 1960s dress — The gym dance, from the cheap seats · full scan →

Square color print of a backyard performance at dusk: five members playing in front of a gray clapboard house, guitarist in a blue tee in the foreground, singer in yellow at center, drums and amps along the hedge — Backyard show, first frame · full scan →

Square color print, same backyard show from further back: the band on a terrace above a stone wall and hedge, guitarist left, drummer center, singer in yellow at the microphone, second guitarist at right — Backyard show, second frame · full scan →

Square color print of five band members crowded on a basement stair landing between sets, in yellow and blue shirts, coats and shelves visible up the staircase behind them — The stair landing, between sets · full scan →

Square color print, heavily creased, of the five posed in a stone-walled basement with Fender amplifiers, a drum kit, and two bass guitars laid across the floor — The stone basement, gear inventoried · full scan →

Color print with silver emulsion damage: on stage under a wood-paneled ceiling, a singer in a gold brocade jacket at the microphone at left while another performer in yellow dances at right, drums behind — The gold jacket, working · full scan →

Color print of the singer in the gold brocade jacket mid-move at center stage, arm extended, drum kit at right and a second vocalist at left, under the same wood-paneled lodge ceiling — The gold jacket, closer · full scan →

Accessions 2003.110.001–010 · bandphotos.zip, 4.6 MB, scanned 2003-01-10 15:41–15:45 · numbering skips 008, as found · original zip retained in the vault and flagged for permanent preservation

Wing VIII

Found in Storage

More objects discovered in the docroot with no link pointing to them — the museum’s favorite provenance.

Scanned photograph of the eWebs.net team gathered around a keyboard, in office attire of the late 1990s — The Team

The only known photograph of the firm: staff huddled around a single keyboard, in the classic stock pose of an industry that had not yet decided what work should look like. Displayed at twice original size; the original is 181 pixels wide. It also appears in situ on the Rotunda storefront.

Accession 2003.822.006 · images/group.jpg · 8 KB

Listening Bench: the loose MP3s

Two audio files sat in the docroot root, adjacent to nothing. Given the client wall lists a club named Vortex, vortex.mp3 may be a commission; spikes.mp3 keeps its secrets. Headphones recommended; expectations optional.

spikes.mp3 · 2:45

vortex.mp3 · 2:20

Accessions 2003.822.055–056 · 4.5 MB combined, an entire month of a lesser host’s bandwidth

Screening Room A: longvideo_01.wmv

Filed on wizard.html — an Adobe GoLive 6 page whose entire body was one link. A stage-magic performance, 1:44, restored from Windows Media 8 to a format your device can decode without installing anything from a magazine cover disc.

Accession 2003.822.051 · converted 2026, original .wmv preserved

Screening Room B: interlake.wmv, restored

The vault’s largest reel, now screening in full: fourteen minutes and fifty seconds of steel-processing machinery — presses, control cabinets, coil lines — shot on a factory floor and encoded at 320×240 for a client the docroot does not name. Industrial video was on the rate card at $175 a minute, which prices this artifact at $2,600. The museum finds it strangely watchable.

Accession 2003.822.052 · interlake.wmv, 27 MB, WMFSDK 8.20 · restored to H.264, 2026 · original .wmv preserved

The Hilton Head Annex

condo.html: a page for a beachfront villa at the Hilton Head Beach and Tennis Resort — ten tennis courts, the largest pool on the island — parked in the company docroot, six photographs, “click on a photo to enlarge.” The page ends: “Our full website will be up in July. For more info contact Jim Mulvey.” The year is not specified. It did not go up in July. All six photographs are shown; the phone number remains between Jim and the resort.

The pool at Hilton Head Beach and Tennis Resort, scanned photograph circa 2003

Accession 2003.822.060 · condo.html + hiltonhead/*.jpg, six photos with six _small thumbnails · the family thread continues in Wing VII

Design mockup for LensDoc.com, a client website comp from 2000, marked as protected artwork — The LensDoc Comp

A year-2000 homepage mockup for LensDoc.com, delivered as one large GIF with a stern warning that the artwork is “protected, under international copyright law, against reproduction in any manner.” The museum reproduces it in this manner.

Accession 2000.x.001 · lensdoc.htm + images/lensdocmockup.gif

The Feedback Form

test.htm, a FrontPage WebBot form asking what kind of comment you would like to send: Complaint, Problem, Suggestion, Praise. Its footer reads, in full and unedited:

Three years in production. The placeholder held.

Accession 2003.822.048 · test.htm · the WebBot never sent a single comment anywhere

The Last Room

How It Ended

At some point after 2003, visitors to ewebs.net stopped finding the blue chrome and the rollover buttons. The homepage was quietly renamed oldindex.html — the museum piece now standing in the Rotunda — and in its place went a single gray page: the splash graphic below, three words, and a door.

images/splash.jpg · 596 × 299 · Web Design : eCommerce : Web Hosting : Internet Marketing : Video Streaming : Motion Graphics : Search Engine Optimization — the colon was the ampersand of its day

is now

ENTER WWW.AREA51STUDIOS.COM

The firm folded into its successor and the domain became a signpost. The signpost then outlived the successor’s relevance, the server it pointed from, and very nearly the century’s first quarter. The files behind it were never deleted — only unlisted, which on the early web was the closest thing to an afterlife.

Museum colophon

This museum was assembled in July 2026, during the decommissioning of the dedicated server that carried the ewebs.net account for its final decades, and expanded later the same month: the storefront was reassembled, the Cobalt RaQ liturgy hung, the Interlake reel restored, and the family band prints moved from the vault to permanent public display. Every image, price, quotation, and file date is real and was recovered from the original docroot. The account also held 2.65 GB of mail and eight years of visitor statistics, which the curators counted but did not read.

One 30 MB hosting package, as it happens, would hold everything here except the machinery footage.