Since 10 years I write about Vernacular Web and Digital Folklore, about early days of the web and web design before it became a profession. It is not that easy to find pages that were made in 93-97 and are still online or look the same. Things changed in 2009, when Yahoo announced that they are closing Geocities, number one free hosting service of the last century, "myspace of the 90es", first home for many web users and a jest for "professional web"
In half a year yahoo gave its users to copy their data, Archive Team managed to partly rescue the pages and release one terabyte torrent of it. In 2010 my partner Dragan Espenschied and I started to download the files. In the middle of 2011 Dragan restored the archive and we started to go through the profiles: collecting, tagging, comparing, analyzing. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project started.
We don't only collect and restore but bring this culture of the 90es back to the web, using contemporary infrastructure. It is http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/ that posts a screenshot of a page every 20 minutes since February 2013. Or my channel on Vine, that allows to see those pages animated and with sound. And of course the blog http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ where we describe the findings.
In my HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED talk I'd like to introduce to the audience pearls of the early web culture, going much deeper than usual Under Construction signs and animated GIFs nostalgia. Will show what did it mean to make a web page technically, philosophically and ideologically. Will also talk about our unique technical setting for emulating the pages and what digital preservation really means. And last but not least will talk about newer cases of deleted social networks and social services.