25 websites lifted whole off a 1996 CD-ROM
In 1996, Weird Science — a British publisher of Amiga CD-ROMs — shipped a two-disc set. Disc one, In-to-the-Net, carried the software you needed to get online: TCP/IP stacks, the AWeb and Voyager browsers, an IBrowse demo, Internet Explorer 2.0. Disc two, Out-Of-The-Net, carried something stranger and far more useful now — the web itself, mirrored to plastic so you could read it with the modem hung up.
That second disc holds 28,304 files across 25 sites: 13,925 HTML pages and 13,887 images, 509.2 MB in total. Each site was mirrored on a specific day, and the ISO 9660 filesystem still records it — the dates below run from 1996-05-08 to 1996-09-25. These are not reconstructions. They are the bytes as pressed.
| Sites mirrored on the disc | 25 |
| Files | 28,304 |
| HTML pages | 13,925 |
| Images | 13,887 |
| Total size | 509.2 MB |
The disc, site by site
| Site | Address in 1996 | Files | Pages | Size | Mirrored |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic | |||||
| MacTutor History of Mathematics | www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk | 3,965 | 1,994 | 17.9 MB | 1996-06-16 |
| Dominic's Physics InfoServer | no public address — disc only | 71 | 41 | 398 KB | 1996-06-16 |
| Art | |||||
| Hiro's Anime Archive | no public address — disc only | 6,437 | 1,985 | 72.8 MB | 1996-09-24 |
| Goya Gallery | no public address — disc only | 36 | 9 | 429 KB | 1996-06-15 |
| Leonardo da Vinci Museum | www.leonardo.net | 101 | 22 | 2.4 MB | 1996-06-15 |
| WebMuseum, Paris | sunsite.unc.edu | 3,404 | 493 | 182.8 MB | 1996-06-16 |
| Motor manufacturers | |||||
| Alfa Romeo | www.alfaromeo.com | 17 | 5 | 52 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| BMW USA | www.bmwusa.com | 91 | 39 | 1.2 MB | 1996-06-24 |
| Ferrari | www.ferrari.it | 49 | 20 | 685 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| Jaguar | www.jaguarvehicles.com | 23 | 7 | 181 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| Lamborghini | www.lamborghini.com | 19 | 5 | 128 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| Lexus | www.lexus.com | 52 | 27 | 395 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| Porsche | www.porsche.com | 27 | 9 | 190 KB | 1996-06-24 |
| Toyota | www.toyota.com | 170 | 56 | 1.6 MB | 1996-06-24 |
| Computing | |||||
| Amiga Online Reference Manual | no public address — disc only | 189 | 146 | 1.2 MB | 1996-07-19 |
| Amiga Technologies | www.amiga.de | 830 | 633 | 7.6 MB | 1996-05-08 |
| Intel | www.intel.com | 857 | 323 | 5.4 MB | 1996-09-25 |
| LightWavePro Online | no public address — disc only | 103 | 16 | 1.6 MB | 1996-08-18 |
| VIScorp | www.viscorp.com | 96 | 63 | 323 KB | 1996-08-16 |
| Motorsport | |||||
| Formula1 Web Site | no public address — disc only | 867 | 736 | 2.8 MB | 1996-09-20 |
| Motorsport News International | www.motorsport.com | 4,040 | 3,995 | 25.1 MB | 1996-09-21 |
| Museums | |||||
| Natural History Museum, London | www.nhm.ac.uk | 767 | 241 | 10.6 MB | 1996-06-15 |
| Places | |||||
| Alcatraz Island (NPS) | www.nps.gov/alcatraz | 134 | 75 | 6.5 MB | 1996-06-14 |
| The White House | www.whitehouse.gov | 4,177 | 2,297 | 97.5 MB | 1996-06-15 |
| Space | |||||
| Project Galileo (NASA/JPL) | www.jpl.nasa.gov | 1,782 | 688 | 69.4 MB | 1996-06-30 |
The White House, 14–15 June 1996
The largest single holding is whitehouse.gov — 4,177 files, 97.5 MB, mirrored over two days in June 1996. It has its own page: the 1996 White House site, in full.
A folder nobody catalogued
Twenty-four of these sites were already in the GE-97 directory. One was not.
/COMPUTER/AMIGA/ holds 189 files that are not a single site but a small bundle of
Amiga web resources: amiCrawler, a search engine for Amiga pages;
an Amiga Online Resource Manual; and a page titled "List of Famous Amiga Uses".
It also contains 34 pages whose title is "404 Not Found". Whoever built this disc ran a crawler, and the crawler dutifully saved the error pages along with everything else. Those 404s are now themselves a 1996 artefact — a record of which links were already broken before the disc was even pressed.
Method. Figures on this page are read directly from the disc image at build time:
file counts and byte sizes from the ISO 9660 directory records, dates from each record's recording
timestamp, and site titles from the <title> element of each mirror's index page.
Original addresses come from the GE-97 catalogue. Nothing here is estimated.
Source: Out-Of-The-Net (Weird Science, 1996), volume label OUTERNET,
companion disc to In-to-the-Net. Page generated .
