WHITEHOUSE.GOV14–15 JUNE 1996

The White House website as it stood in June 1996

You can walk through it yourself. This is not a gallery of screenshots — the whole site is mounted inside the museum and still works. Open The Old Internet, switch the machine on, and in Internet Explorer visit the CD-ROM Shelf. The White House is shelved there with the other twenty-four sites from the disc. Open it and you are reading the June 1996 pages themselves, in a period browser, on a period desktop — waving flag and all.

This is not a reconstruction and it did not come from a web archive. It came off a CD-ROM. In 1996 the British publisher Weird Science mirrored whitehouse.gov onto the second disc of its In-to-the-Net set, so that Amiga owners could browse the site with the modem hung up. The mirror runs to 4,177 files and 97.5 MB, and every file still carries its ISO 9660 recording date.

Files	4,177
HTML pages	2,297
Images (GIF and JPEG)	1,784
Total size	97.5 MB

Dated to the day

The disc records when each file was written. The whole mirror was captured across two days:

Recording date	Files
1996-06-14	158
1996-06-15	4,019

The home page ran on a CGI script

The first line inside WH/WELCOME.HTM is a comment left by the mirroring tool, recording where the page came from:

<!-- URL "http://www.whitehouse.gov/cgi-bin/pagegen.cgi" -->

The 1996 White House home page was not a static file. It was generated on each request by a program called pagegen.cgi. That program is gone, and no archive can re-run it. What survives here is one of its outputs, frozen on the day it was fetched.

A Java applet of a waving flag

The page opens with two Java applets, one either side of the White House photograph. Each plays a sixteen-frame film strip out of a single GIF:

<applet code=Flag.class width=98 height=57> <param name=film value="flag.gif"> <param name=frames value=16> <param name=delay value=100> </applet>

Java applets stopped running in mainstream browsers years ago. The class file, Flag.class, and its film strip are both on the disc.

What the site contained

Counting files beneath each top-level section of WH/:

Section	Path	Files
Executive Office of the President	WH/EOP/	1,767
Glimpse search index	WH/GLIMPSE/	659
White House tours	WH/TOURS/	244
The White House for Kids	WH/KIDS/	217
Publications	WH/PUBLICAT/	165
Accomplishments	WH/ACCOMPLI/	132
What's New	WH/NEW/	128
The First Family	WH/FAMILY/	89
White House Fellows	WH/WH_FELLO/	84
Dispatches	WH/DISPATCH/	83
Site images	WH/IMAGES/	77
Independent agencies	WH/INDEPEND/	43
Christmas at the White House	WH/CHRISTMA/	39
Pointers to other servers	WH/POINTERS/	28

Formats on the disc

Including audio the modern web would not recognise — Sun .au files, Windows .wav, and RealAudio .ram metafiles pointing at streams that no longer stream.

Extension	Files
.htm	2,297
.gif	1,615
.jpg	168
.au	32
.tex	19
.wav	18
.ram	11
.txt	10
.cgi	2
.pdf	2

Still to do: a direct comparison against the Internet Archive's holdings for whitehouse.gov in June 1996 — how many of these 2,297 pages have a surviving capture, and how many do not. That measurement has not been made yet, and this page will not claim a gap it has not checked. It will be added here once the comparison has actually run.

← All 25 sites on the disc

Method. File counts, byte sizes and dates are read from the ISO 9660 directory records of the disc image at build time. The CGI comment and the applet markup are quoted verbatim from /PLACES/WH_HOUSE/WH/WELCOME.HTM on the disc.

Source: Out-Of-The-Net (Weird Science, 1996), volume label OUTERNET. Page generated 2026-07-31.

GE-97 TERMINAL