The Museum

Museums contain exhibits for one's entertainment and edification. There are musems for all fields, many for art, science, and history; this one covers the art, science, and history of ARUGGERI.COM. I've yet to make any real progress with Princeton's computer science department to come up with a degree program on it, so for now, this page will have to do.

In the Beginning...

Imagine yourself in 1993, a time in the distant past of the Internet. Being "on the net" meant mainly that you had a university email account, or worked in some sort of academic or research capacity. People still used text-only tools like Gopher and Lynx to navigate the Internet, the World Wide Web was a new idea, and a program called "NCSA Mosaic" claiming to be a "web browser" was the hottest piece of software around, excepting perhaps Doom (the original Doom). You needed a modem to get onto the Internet, and you needed a phone line to use a modem. Admittedly, I never used one of those modems that needed an actual phone headset to connect.

Anyway, way back in 1993, I had a web page. I also had a T1 ethernet connection to the Internet from my college dorm room, which gave me a then-astonishing 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth, and a web server running on my PC. I still have that web page, and every single one I have created ever since. (It also took me 3 years after graduating to get close to the same Internet speed again.)

For the sake of historical accuracy and the good of posterity, I have brought that first site and all of its descendants back to life for your viewing pleasure. Why I am engaging in this masochistic exercise in public humiliation is a good question. I do think it's pretty cool to look back at the evolution of web technology, or perhaps more accurately, the evolution of my web design aesthetic. I also have a somewhat obsessive-compulsive pesonality that hates to throw anything away, like notebooks, email, source code, and old bread (I know it expired, dear, but I can still eat it). The archivist (hoarder?) sense is strong in my family, as attested by the multiple rooms of mollusc specimens and multiple shelves of classical CDs that fill my parents' house.

I am now up to the ninth(!) major revision of my personal web site, and below are links at conveniently spaced intervals to the previous versions. I'd like to see anyone else even try to match this for self-indulgence and decadence on a personal web site. Not gonna happen!

You will note that many of these sites themselves also have a museum or history section, starting in 1999, pointing to the earlier versions; yes, I've been at this for a while. You will also note the existence of both aruggeri.com and anthonyruggeri.com. The anthonyruggeri.com domain was my attempt to get spam under control, before there were better ways of controlling spam.

Ironically, the earliest versions of the site contained the simplest form of HTML, and still work fine today. As things progressed, I began using server-side programming to make things more structured and "easier," and databases to manage content, but of course those approaches have compatibility and maintenance pitfalls. I still have the classic ASP and ASP.NET versions around, but I've converted them to plain HTML to avoid having to actually run server-side code and maintain MySQL or SQL Server databases. It's become hard to find third party hosting that can even support classic ASP. The latest version of the site is back to plain old client-side HTML, with a limited dose of Javascript to automate things a bit (but nothing like the monstrosity that is full-blown modern web technology, with its never-ending cascade of frameworks). Once Javascript is defunct, well... then we're all f***ed, except that the browser of this hopefully-not-so-distant future will probably translate Javascript to something else on the fly (like Mandarin).

The interesting old sound samples have gone from being useless because nobody had the software to hear them, to useful because everybody had the software to hear them, to pointless because they are the digital equivalent of parchment paper: sure, you can read it, but it's a bit yellowed and crisp and prone to fall apart at any moment. In a world of instant gratification for any kind of music on just about any device or platform, saying they're unremarkable is an understatement.

Show Me Some Awesome!

Without further ado, because there's been more than enough ado on this page already, here are the sites:

1993 - it begins.

  1995 - House of Ruggeri.

    1997 - House II.

      1999 - aruggeri.com, version 1.0.

        2001 - an aruggeri.com odyssey (clever, eh?).

          2002 - aruggeri.com again.

            2007 - officially the 2009 version, started in 2007.

              2011 - an awesomely interactive, database-driven extravaganza that I never finished.

                2019 - the one you're viewing now.

Prehistory

Actually, the real beginning for me was back in the 1980's, with an IBM PC clone, a slow-as-molasses 1200 baud modem, and a combination of Compuserve and electronic bulletin board systems (BBS's) to which you had to connect via actual phone numbers. A friend of mine ran a BBS called Udo's Polytechnic Institute where a bunch of us did... actually, I don't even remember. Nerdy stuff I guess.