Young Astronaut Council ad

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away....

Kids dreamt of being astronauts, sailing the solar winds to Mars (or at least the moon [or at at least a few miles up for a few weeks while trying to repair a busted telescope or bring Fritos and vodka to the bored-ass crew of the International Space Station]). Now, thanks to funding-cuts, a relatively cruddy economy, and a general lack of interest in cool shit like rockets, NASA has become a well-funded think-tank that might get by sending probes to Uranus and devising new ways to grow cannabis in zero-G.

To be fair, kids today might still be able to train as astronauts, but they'll be flight attendants aboard Virgin Spacelines flights shuffling sararimen between Tokyo and LA; or miners sucking palladium from asteroids for Halliburton. But hey, maybe NASA will maintain relevancy by being the FAA of space.

Below is a scanned ad from a 1986 issue of OMNI promoting the Young Astronaut Council, which was founded in 1984 as a sort of booster organization for math, science, and all things cosmological. The council seems to be defunct, as its website is no longer responding. The last working snapshot was taken on September 8, 2009, but all others since point to a blank page.

If only they'd known better, this ad would have featured an IBM PC...with rockets.

Batch #1 of E-mail GIFs from Grove

Below is a curious crop of e-mail GIFs (icons) found on sites in University of Florida's old personal web domain, Grove. This batch represents an hour or so of scrounging across the first four letters of Grove's alpha directory (1996).

What's most interesting to me re e-mail icons is the slavish adherence (then) to the letter/postal metaphor. Granted, "e-mail" is itself a metaphor (as dated as "instant message", given that "e-mail" is essentially instant), but an icon of a letter, or a GIF of a message being folded and inserted into an envelope is nothing if not "mailed" in. The iconography of e-mail has effectively disappeared from the working web, but little artifacts like these point to a time when the idea of e-mail was only as comfortable as the familiar imagery of a physical letter being folded, stuffed, and sent off through (physical) space.

 (custom design!)



 (representative of a demanding persona?)







(strict adherence to postal metaphor)



(one of the most common GIFs)



















 (not even the correct metaphor!)























 (serious attachment to the mail metaphor)







(playful, but somehow sinister)

GROVE

Grove was University of Florida's once-popular and now-defunct personal web space domain, Grove. From 1996 until 2012 grove.ufl.edu served as a space for students, staff, and faculty to create hosted websites, the contents of which were seemingly unrefereed and ranged from simple resumes and course companions to platforms for cartoon fandom and dating profiles. The earlier sites (1996-2000) are definitely the most interesting from an archaeological perspective and showcase the stylistic leanings and technological prowess (or lack thereof) of early Internet culture. Grove has been archived by Wayback Machine going as a far back as December 1996 and much of the media (sounds, images, narratives) are still intact and harvestable.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, aside from the fascinating little artifacts strewn liberally across each page, is the progressive look a digital archaeologist can participate in because of Wayback Machine's snapshot method, which archives a domain month by month, allowing a person to watch the progress (or lack) made in the maintenance of a student's website. Students obviously spent a finite amount of time at the university and their sites might stall, so to speak, after for or five years. Some students did little to enhance their sites during their time at UF, their web space acting as a sort of "hello world". Staff and faculty on the other hand may have actively maintained their sites for the entire life of Grove (15 years).

Typical Grove site

The technical abilities of each site's creator varies wildly, Many creators follow a recurring apologetic theme, whereby they beg forgiveness for the shoddy construction of their site then proceed to fill it with links, wallpapers, and memory-hodding GIFs. Others were quite adept and included frames (a once-popular phenomenon now forbidden in site creation), embedded videos, and other flashy bits of HTML. Many creators, regardless of their aptitude as designers, were keen on referencing friends' sites, especially if those friends were on Grove and had a noteworthy web space.

I think that Grove is indicative of a nanocosm, which is to say it's a microcosm of a microcosm. In this case, Grove is a lot like GeoCities, which was a guided (but still fairly unhindered) exercise in web development and community building that required little technical expertise. GeoCities effectively democratized the World Wide Web and inducted into its pantheon every mortal who thought the Internet an impenetrable fortress reserved only for god-like hackers. In a hierarchy of "safeness" Grove exists below GeoCities, in that it was administered by a state university, was only open to college constituents, and required little expertise to engage in. Like GeoCities, Grove was focused on community building and exploration of a democratized Internet. Unlike GeoCities, it was enclosed in a safe domain like that of a gigantic university - but the lineage is strong.

Typical GeoCities site

GGF will continue to explore aspects of Grove, as well as any other similarly constructed - and aged - university-tied personal web domains (University of Southern California once maintained a very similar domain that is Grove's closest contemporary). Some thing GGF might explore are artifacts (GIFs, MIDI, multimedia); trends (apologetic openings, site progression); and site of particular note that truly stand out.

I'm willing to concede that Wayback Machine might some day disappear and things like Grove along with it. In order to allay my own fears, I plan on harvesting the entirety of Grove (and any other such domains), backing them up accordingly. Old Dominion's Warrick Tool will likely be the scraper I wield, and Carbonite the storage solution.