The Museum

Museums contain exhibits for one's entertainment and edification. There are musems for all fields, but many for art, science, and history. This museum covers the art, science, and history of ARUGGERI.COM. I'm still working with Princeton's computer science department to come up with a degree program, so for now, this page will have to do.

Remember the "old days" when being on the net meant you had a university email account? When the World Wide Web was actually a new idea? When Mosaic was the hottest piece of software around (it was much better than gopher) and people still used Lynx to browse web pages? When you actually needed a phone to use a modem and you actually needed a modem to get online? Probably not, since those days have long since passed.

I had a web page back then. I also had a T1 connection to the Internet, and a web server running on my PC.

For the sake of historical accuracy and the good of posterity, I have brought this first site and its descendants back to life for your viewing pleasure. Why I am engaging in this masochistic exercise in public humiliation, I don't know. I'd like to get my money's worth for the umpteen megabytes of site space I rent, for one thing. For another, I think it's pretty cool to look back at the evolution of web technology, or perhaps more obviously, the evolution of my graphic design skills. I also have a somewhat obsessive-compulsive pesonality that hates to throw anything away, like email, source code, and old bread (I know it expired, honey, but I can still eat it).

I am now up to the 8th(!) major revision of my personal web site, and below are links at conveniently spaced intervals to the previous versions. Have at 'em. The interesting old sound samples have gone from being useless because nobody had the software, to useful because everybody had the software, to pointless because they are the digital equivalent of parchment paper. Sure, you can read it, but it's kind of yellowed and crisp and prone to fall apart at any moment.

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 also has a history section, starting in 1999, pointing to the then-earlier versions of the site. I've been at this for a while. You will 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.

1993: Scary!

1995: House of Ruggeri

1997: House II

1999: aruggeri.com, version 1.0

2001: an aruggeri.com odyssey

2002: ANTHONYRUGGERI.COM (soft of)

2007: .NET version!