Back when the web still fit in our heads, it was something you built, not something you subscribed to. You would log into a shell account, cd ~/public_html, drop an index.html, and that was it. Congratulations, you were a webmaster. No Kubernetes, no APIs, no 900 line YAML files pretending to be documentation. Just you, a text editor, and the raw satisfaction of knowing that what you uploaded was exactly what the world saw, typos, blinking GIFs, and all.
It was not pretty. The fonts were bad, the <marquee> tags were worse, and half your links pointed to a friend’s site that was “under construction” for five years straight. But it was ours, a chaotic, handmade patchwork of curiosity and caffeine. We did not have uptime SLAs; we had hope and a beige tower PC that doubled as a space heater.
We learned HTML by viewing source on each other’s pages. We learned networking by breaking PPP and fixing it again before our parents needed the phone line. Every page carried a human fingerprint: a little bad CSS, a counter at the bottom bragging “00124 visitors,” and a guestbook filled with ASCII art. It was not content creation. It was personality rendered in <table> tags.
Then Came the Shift
Then broadband happened. Then PHP happened. Then the venture capital showed up like ants at a picnic.
CGI gave way to CMSs, which gave way to the cloud, which gave way to nobody really knowing where their stuff lives anymore. One day we woke up and realized we had traded scp for a button that said Deploy. The web went from pages to profiles, from something we built to something we rent.
And the new developers, they deploy twelve microservices to render a button, hold stand up meetings about their sprint velocity, and brag about their latency like it is a personality trait. Meanwhile, half their stack breaks because someone at AWS sneezed.
Back in the day, we did not scale horizontally, we just prayed vertically and hoped the kernel did not panic.
The Builder’s Era
You did not need permission to be online. You did not need an OAuth token or a privacy policy lawyer. You needed a modem, a text editor, and the patience to upload over 33.6k.
# web_1999.sh
mkdir ~/public_html
cp index.html ~/public_html/
chmod 755 -R ~/public_html
# Congratulations, you're now a web developer.That was it. If your CSS worked in both Netscape and IE6, you were basically a wizard. Your uptime was measured in cups of coffee, and your incident response plan was “wake up when the fan stops spinning.”
The Corporate Web
By the 2010s, everything had been abstracted to death. The machine became a metaphor. We went from servers to instances, from hard drives to volumes, from users to engagement metrics. The word community got replaced by platform.
Now your identity online exists at the pleasure of three megacorps, the holy trinity of Google, Amazon, and Apple, each one renting you your own data back at a markup. The internet stopped being a network of people and became a mall of tenants, each one smiling from behind a Terms of Service.
But Some of Us Stayed
Not everyone sold out to the cloud gods. A few of us stayed behind, keeping the lights on in forgotten racks, self hosting mail and web, making sure the old world still had a heartbeat.
We still get that little dopamine hit when a service passes syntax check on the first try. We still tail logs like oracles. We still trust cron more than any SaaS scheduler.
It is not nostalgia, it is stewardship. We do it because someone has to remember what real control feels like. Because the web was never supposed to be rented, it was supposed to be understood.
Why I Still Run My Own
When I boot my server and watch the daemons spin up clean, I am not chasing clicks. I am keeping a promise. The one we all made back when the internet was still a handshake agreement between geeks, I will build something cool, you build something cool, and we will link to each other.
Maybe one day, when the cloud goes down, someone will remember how to SCP again. And if my little corner of the web ends up as a museum exhibit, I hope they mount the server in glass and label it:
Last Known Independent.
Because we were here. We built this. Before the cloud turned it into a service, it was a craft. And for some of us, it still is.