The 1996 Web Sites — Nicolas Blaza's Thesis

The 1996 Web Sites
Every URL cited in the thesis, preserved via the Wayback Machine

These are the thirteen websites I cited in the thesis bibliography in 1996. Almost all of the original URLs are now dead — most of these companies, universities, and research groups have either disappeared, rebranded, or restructured their sites beyond recognition.

However, thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, many of these pages have been preserved in something close to their 1996 form. Click the "Wayback" link next to each entry to see the page roughly as it looked when I cited it.

[Note: not every URL has a 1996 snapshot. Where the Wayback Machine doesn't have one, you'll see the closest available capture, or a calendar view of what is available. The Internet Archive's coverage of the early Web is incomplete but extraordinary.]

Netscape home page The mothership. Where you went to download a new version every few weeks. http://home.netscape.com/	Wayback » PRESERVED
NCSA (Mosaic developers) The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois — where Mosaic was built. http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/	Wayback » PRESERVED
Georgia Tech GVU user surveys The Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center's bi-annual Web user survey — source of the 82.6% / 56% / 10.5% figures in Section 2.8. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/	Wayback » PRESERVED
Netscape 1.1 tutorial Ralph at infi.net's personal Netscape tutorial. The web was once 90% personal pages like this. http://www.infi.net/~rdalph/cai/netscape/1.1/	Wayback »
Ben Shneiderman's group at CMU The Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Shneiderman's framework underpins half the thesis. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu/user/hcii/www/hcii-home.html	Wayback »
NYU HCI papers Internet audio / HCI introduction paper at NYU. http://www.nyu.edu/atg/docs/papers/internet.audio/introchi.html	Wayback »
TU Delft HCI groups Index of Human-Computer Interaction research groups maintained at the Delft University of Technology. http://is.twi.tudelft.nl/hci/groups.html	Wayback »
Aviation HCI usability studies Human Factors site at the University of Illinois Institute of Aviation. http://www.aviation.uiuc.edu/humfacsites/host.html	Wayback »
Netscape online companion (Ventana) Ventana Media's Netscape Quick Tour companion site. Ventana published the early Netscape guidebooks. http://www.vmedia.com/nqt.html	Wayback »
CIBER research source Michigan State's Center for International Business Education and Research. http://ciber.bus.msu.edu/	Wayback »
PC World magazine Then-leading PC magazine. Source of several of the Web design / browser-wars articles cited. http://www.pcworld.com/	Wayback » PRESERVED
Byte magazine Legendary computing magazine. Ceased print publication in 1998. Quoted multiple times in Chapter 5. http://www.byte.com/	Wayback » PRESERVED
Network Wizards (Internet host count) Source of the "6.642 million hosts" figure in Section 2.3. Network Wizards' historical surveys were the canonical Internet population census in the mid-90s. http://www.nw.com/	Wayback »

Why this page exists

In 1996, every academic thesis had a bibliography of URLs at the back. By 2026, most of those URLs are dead links. This is the central problem of web-based citation: the medium I was writing about is also the medium that erodes my evidence.

The Internet Archive exists precisely to solve this. It has been crawling and preserving the public web since 1996 — the same year as the thesis. So for thirty years now, every page on the public web has had a chance to be captured. Some of the URLs above have hundreds of snapshots. Some have one or two. A few have none at all.

What survives, survives because someone — or some automated crawler — thought to look at the right moment. That fragility is itself a finding the thesis didn't quite anticipate.