The other day I very randomly stumbled upon one of my earliest homes on the Internet, only to find that apparently it had shutdown, like, two and a half years ago.
This honestly kind of surprised me because frankly, I’m surprised that it even stayed afloat as long as it had!
Spoiler Alert – Here’s a post that I wrote eight years ago both surprised and impressed that it was still online in 2017!
Don’t get me wrong – Grex holds a special place in my heart as one of the first Internet accounts that I held on someone else’s computer, and it was fun meeting people from all over but mostly Michigan to chat about video games and role playing games and whatever other nerdy stuff yours truly was into between the ages of roughly 14 and 17. Nowadays, there’s really no need for a place like Grex when you’ve got forums like Reddit and chatrooms like Discord and social media like Facebook that has managed to persuade grandparents into coming online … even when maybe they shouldn’t, purely for reasons of political expression and a lack of the ability to not share every last thought that comes through their heads online…
But then again, look at me here – I’ve been writing this blog pretty much since the web went graphical and have amassed 1.1 million words read by nearly dozens of people, so I guess that I’m not much better!
Not to mention, nowadays a service like Grex could pretty easily run off of any of a number of servers in my closet, or even on something like AWS for next to nothing. It started as a hobby by computer geeks my senior and ran until it was years or even decades beyond obsolete. As much as it pains me to think of all of the web links that have gone dead either because websites went offline or upgraded and scrapped their old content, or even when their owners pass away with no one left who understands how to keep them running … the circle of life is more like the line chart of life when it comes to Internet sites.
If you’re lucky, you get archived so that people like me can go back in time via the Wayback Machine every now and then for a glimpse at what things were like before social media and ads and spam took over the Internet. Ironically for Grex, they barely had a web presence because the web itself was barely a thing at that point, but since nobody thankfully archived our telnet connections, instead back in 1996 Grex’s homepage looked a little something like this…
I’m pretty sure I had found it years earlier via a gopher search through one of the state universities that we accessed simply from a Host: prompt after dialing in to one of our local library’s modems, whereas many who lived downstate in Ann Arbor, MI actually dialed in directly to Grex as their gateway to the greater Internet in its infancy.
We’ve come a long ways in the last 30 years. It makes me wonder how much of it I’ll still recognize once another 30 come and go!
Or if I’ll even still be able to see the screen without super bi-focals at this rate!