The end of an era

April 2026

Recently, a letter was delivered that I knew would arrive some day. I had already given thought to its subject in anticipation.

For decades, I have published my website with one of the first ISPs (Internet Service Provider) in the Netherlands, XS4ALL, that offered hosting for a simple website as a bonus to their internet subscriptions. XS4ALL were not the only one to offer this little extra, but they were a larger, socially involved ISP who drew media attention - that will explain why they are remembered while the others faded from memory. Fact is that many early internet users in the Netherlands built and posted homepages through XS4ALL. I was among them, proudly posting a homepage at 'my' subdomain, jmvdveer.

Through their personal homepages, of which there have been several thousands, people could for the first time express themselves to the world with relative ease. They were listed alphabetically in a simple online directory as illustrated in the image below; note the absence of a search function. Since CMS tools would not arrive for years to come and the service only supported basic technology, those sites were creative and pluriform inventions. People experimented on those pages with nascent social media and online communication, new ways to publish works of art, as well as early online shops and even primitive virtual worlds. An internet analogue of the Cambrian explosion, if you will.

Please allow me a digression here. Nowadays, all software you need is made available through the web for download. Not so thirty years ago. Your ISP would supply you with physical media containing the software you needed. When I contracted XS4ALL in the mid 1990's, that would typically be a floppy disk. I was amused to discover that I still have one in my archives, see the picture below. Apparently the XS4ALL logo was designed as a Dutch license plate, black on yellow, since at the time the Internet was also known as the Digital Highway.

In the 1990's, there was no such thing as WiFi or mobile data yet, and routers were dedicated minicomputers, not the household items that appeared around the turn of the century. As a home user, you had to call your ISP over a landline, using telephone modems. There would be a local phone number near you, to save on the telephone company bill. I still know the Amsterdam XS4ALL phone number by heart, since that was the portal I needed to call into. When you were online, the rest of the family could not use the phone. The bandwidth of those modems was nowhere near today's standards, think of a few kilobytes of data per second. That puts the relative simplicity of early webpages, and XS4ALL homepages for that matter, in a different perspective.

Let us return to the present day now. Companies merge, and large Dutch telecom provider KPN acquired XS4ALL. Professional hosting services were discontinued, though existing personal XS4ALL homepages remained online. Since these early homepages would probably vanish eventually, the National Library of the Netherlands archived them in a web collection as part of a larger project preserving Dutch digital heritage, a collection that was later named UNESCO world heritage. Incidentally, the library started archiving my site as well, at a later stage. The letter mentioned above informed me however that these last XS4ALL homepages will now also be taken offline. I will not deny that I had seen this coming. From a cost perspective, I wondered how long a telecom provider for whom hosting is not a core business, would continue keeping these vintage homepages online. A reasonable number of years after all, as it turned out.

So, fair enough I thought, still the letter left me with a double feeling. It heralded the end of an era in Dutch internet history. I will be deprived of my cherished site which I have been using for thirty years. On the other hand, the time had arrived to move forward with a plan I was preparing for some time - to republish my homepage at its own domain. I acted swiftly, and the result is the site you are visiting today. Like thirty years ago, I contracted services with a not-too-large, independent hosting company offering good technical support. Only this time I have my own domain name, so the new set-up should be consolidation-proof. However, this site starts its new life as the static site it has always been. It evolves, yet stays the same.

All good things must come to an end. Hence thank you XS4ALL, for the many hours of happy tinkering in a time when Netscape Navigator was the most advanced browser. For the last 25 years or so, the main purpose of my site has been to distribute Algol 68 Genie and to be a blog for subjects I take an interest in. I will continue doing these things I am passionate about under a new banner and hope, dear reader, that you will keep accompanying me.

Published in category Essays. More on Computer history, Digital heritage or Internet.