30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.
In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.
Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.
After enough time elapses (and it has!) it transitions from being "bad code" to just nostalgia-inducing.
Take a gander at the code over at TUHS. The original vi from UCB, for instance, wouldn't be considered "good code" by anyone's standards in the past 40+ years, but nobody is thinking poorly of Bill Joy, Mary Ann Horton, or anyone else involved.
What amazes me most is: How the hell did you maintain interest in keeping the site alive after so much time had elapsed? 1995 was so different from e.g. 2009 and I imagine the same was true of you.
It doesn't take much to keep the site alive -- I've just had to transition it across hosts a few times, but otherwise it just continues to sit there. There is a tiny amount of revenue that still comes through it, but mostly I just like the idea that it still exists, and I think others do too. I suppose I also don't want to let go of my fifteen minutes of fame. :)
These days, the thing that most impresses my nephews is that I posted the second ever video to YouTube (college roommate was a cofounder). I have long since lost control of the channel (it was taken during a transition from old YouTube accounts to Google accounts when someone guessed the simple password). Since hacker news can sometimes be the support site of the internet I'll throw it out there -- if anyone has a contact at YouTube that can return the channel to me, that would be awesome. I imagine it is long-since gone.
Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.
I remember originally registering in order to upvote, not to comment or submit. I'm not sure how common that is but it is a much less scary way to begin to contribute.
When I got tired of having to manage my NIN news website (circa June 1999) by myself, I grabbed the Guestbook script from here, tweaked it a little bit, and it became a very rudimentary CMS for a volunteer staff of about a dozen contributors. Eventually I moved to a more robust Perl-based tool (News Publisher by Grant Williams), a version of which continues to power that same site today.
It's somewhat interesting to me that, according to Wikipedia, the word "blog" as an abbreviation of weblog came into use the month before I started that site.
Looking back, discovering Matt's Script Archive along with a used copy of Learning Perl in 1997 was probably the biggest influence in the trajectory of my entire career. Thanks, Matt!
As somebody in the ISP/webhosting business back then, I spend quite a bit of time helping people set these up. Such a blast from the past. Glad to see it is still hanging around!
i remember you had a script that created animated images before that even was a thing. It exploited some kind of quirk in Netscape, must have been 1994-1996?
Gosh. Seeing that is kind of more ... emotional than I'd have expected. Gonna print a screenshot of it for the memories folder. It was just such a different time. Can't imagine what later generations would think was the point of things like a web counter, but golly that was so cool back in the day. :)
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
Exactly! These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia. I wrote and published my first public website on GeoCities. Sadly, that's lose to time. The second one I wrote was published on 20m.com which offered 20 MB of free hosting space and a custom subdomain. That was more than 20 years ago. Incredibly 20m.com and that silly website of mine are still online: <http://encoders.20m.com/>!
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
<isml type="counter">
It's fascinating how some forgotten corners of the web are still quietly running, long after the rest of the Internet has moved on.
Like many, I got my start with perl by finding myself having to customize a WWWBoard. The site owner then switched to a new perl based forum that used flat linear threads, the Ultimate Bulletin Board. (Which itself is based on code in Selena Sol's "Instant CGI/Perl"!) So, I learned that too. The guy that made it had a forum for it where other people were sharing their changes to the code, mind you this was a commercial product. The company ended up hiring a handful of us from that forum. I ended up doing the coding on the perl UBB for five years, launching my career.
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
It cannot be stressed enough how _vital_ these scripts were to making the WWW an actual functional technical resource; These scripts were a key, if not the key, in growing the actual interactive web, showing the potential of CGI, and in guiding the evolution of web2.0 and beyond.
Its value and place in history can't be overstated.
What a throwback! I discovered these as a kid in the early days of the web. I remember the perl being a little too obtuse to grok as a preteen, but I figured out where I could change things at certain parts of the code to make things look a little differently. Those were magical years that inspired me to get into coding and problem solving as an adult. Thanks Matt.
Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.
Programmatically generating web content felt so rad in the 1990s. It's funny to me now because with deeper historical knowledge it's not a lot different than what many block-mode green screen systems were doing for a long time before that. Of course it grew up into something more, but the early web was not much different than that with fonts and image embeds and relying on the underlying transport and naming system to make it easy to span.
WWWBoard is such a nostalgia hit. My local music venue's forum was where my early internet persona originated. Sometimes I nostalgic and use Wayback machine to see what all my fellow teenagers were talking about 25 years ago.
Fun fact: WWWBoard had a brief cameo in the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- their official community site used the script for many years after most had moved on.
About 1,000 -- usage peaked in 2008. I never really added additional features or did the work that would have kept it relevant. It's mostly in maintenance mode and self-serve at this point.
That's great; it's always good to hear that someone who contributed so much value was able to get paid something for it.
In 1995-ish, I had just started working at a new ISP. My boss dropped Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days on my desk and said, "You need to learn to make guestbooks and things for our users." Your scripts were a big help in getting me up to speed.
30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.
In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
That's interesting, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
I'm amazed that you created an HN account in 2014 but that this is your first comment. How did you resist the temptation to comment for so many years?
I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.
heh, thanks! :) To be fair, the feedback has always been more positive than negative.
Thank you for keeping your site up all these years.
Looking at your website brings me back to my childhood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xwY5ciOOC0&t=144s
Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.
> some of the worst code on the internet
After enough time elapses (and it has!) it transitions from being "bad code" to just nostalgia-inducing.
Take a gander at the code over at TUHS. The original vi from UCB, for instance, wouldn't be considered "good code" by anyone's standards in the past 40+ years, but nobody is thinking poorly of Bill Joy, Mary Ann Horton, or anyone else involved.
What amazes me most is: How the hell did you maintain interest in keeping the site alive after so much time had elapsed? 1995 was so different from e.g. 2009 and I imagine the same was true of you.
It doesn't take much to keep the site alive -- I've just had to transition it across hosts a few times, but otherwise it just continues to sit there. There is a tiny amount of revenue that still comes through it, but mostly I just like the idea that it still exists, and I think others do too. I suppose I also don't want to let go of my fifteen minutes of fame. :)
These days, the thing that most impresses my nephews is that I posted the second ever video to YouTube (college roommate was a cofounder). I have long since lost control of the channel (it was taken during a transition from old YouTube accounts to Google accounts when someone guessed the simple password). Since hacker news can sometimes be the support site of the internet I'll throw it out there -- if anyone has a contact at YouTube that can return the channel to me, that would be awesome. I imagine it is long-since gone.
Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.
I asked dang once and he said like 1% of visitors comment.
I had assumed that the majority of accounts are created when the owner first wants to write a comment (or post a submission).
I wonder whether dang meant 1% of registered visitors, or 1% of visitors.
I remember originally registering in order to upvote, not to comment or submit. I'm not sure how common that is but it is a much less scary way to begin to contribute.
You can't vote until you have 500 karma
You can't downvote until you have 500 karma. You can upvote posts and comments right out of the gate, AFAIK.
confirmed - I just crossed the 500 line and the downvote triangle appeared below the upvote triangle
IIRC it was the latter.
I'm curious what percentage responds to replies to their comments. I think it is quite high here.
When I got tired of having to manage my NIN news website (circa June 1999) by myself, I grabbed the Guestbook script from here, tweaked it a little bit, and it became a very rudimentary CMS for a volunteer staff of about a dozen contributors. Eventually I moved to a more robust Perl-based tool (News Publisher by Grant Williams), a version of which continues to power that same site today.
But I always think of https://www.theninhotline.com/news/ as a hacked guestbook script.
It's somewhat interesting to me that, according to Wikipedia, the word "blog" as an abbreviation of weblog came into use the month before I started that site.
Thank you for this site. It helped me learn Perl and use it to make some cool CGI scripts.
Thanks for your form mailer. That was the first cgi-bin script I had ever installed and run on Apache. xD
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Looking back, discovering Matt's Script Archive along with a used copy of Learning Perl in 1997 was probably the biggest influence in the trajectory of my entire career. Thanks, Matt!
As somebody in the ISP/webhosting business back then, I spend quite a bit of time helping people set these up. Such a blast from the past. Glad to see it is still hanging around!
Wow what a small world! When I was learning Perl in the early 2000s, I learned in part by copying and tweaking your scripts.
Thanks for sharing these into the world. I found them a huge help.
Hey, thanks Matt for providing a well lit path to getting things done on the Internet before anyone knew what they were doing.
Thanks for creating this resource that helped so many people build programs for the web so long ago.
Thanks Matt!
I ran a forum (30k+ monthly users) last century using the WWWboard.
i remember you had a script that created animated images before that even was a thing. It exploited some kind of quirk in Netscape, must have been 1994-1996?
Gosh. Seeing that is kind of more ... emotional than I'd have expected. Gonna print a screenshot of it for the memories folder. It was just such a different time. Can't imagine what later generations would think was the point of things like a web counter, but golly that was so cool back in the day. :)
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
Exactly! These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia. I wrote and published my first public website on GeoCities. Sadly, that's lose to time. The second one I wrote was published on 20m.com which offered 20 MB of free hosting space and a custom subdomain. That was more than 20 years ago. Incredibly 20m.com and that silly website of mine are still online: <http://encoders.20m.com/>!
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
It's fascinating how some forgotten corners of the web are still quietly running, long after the rest of the Internet has moved on.> These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia.
There's a subreddit dedicated to these kinds of sites: https://reddit.com/r/forgottenwebsites/
Thank you for this! I just joined/subscribed to it.
Related. Others?
Matt's Script Archive, Inc.: Free Perl CGI Scripts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33305258 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)
Matt's Script Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789342 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Matt's Script Archive. Offering free CGI scripts to the web community since 1995 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391802 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
Like many, I got my start with perl by finding myself having to customize a WWWBoard. The site owner then switched to a new perl based forum that used flat linear threads, the Ultimate Bulletin Board. (Which itself is based on code in Selena Sol's "Instant CGI/Perl"!) So, I learned that too. The guy that made it had a forum for it where other people were sharing their changes to the code, mind you this was a commercial product. The company ended up hiring a handful of us from that forum. I ended up doing the coding on the perl UBB for five years, launching my career.
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
It cannot be stressed enough how _vital_ these scripts were to making the WWW an actual functional technical resource; These scripts were a key, if not the key, in growing the actual interactive web, showing the potential of CGI, and in guiding the evolution of web2.0 and beyond.
Its value and place in history can't be overstated.
What a throwback! I discovered these as a kid in the early days of the web. I remember the perl being a little too obtuse to grok as a preteen, but I figured out where I could change things at certain parts of the code to make things look a little differently. Those were magical years that inspired me to get into coding and problem solving as an adult. Thanks Matt.
Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.
Programmatically generating web content felt so rad in the 1990s. It's funny to me now because with deeper historical knowledge it's not a lot different than what many block-mode green screen systems were doing for a long time before that. Of course it grew up into something more, but the early web was not much different than that with fonts and image embeds and relying on the underlying transport and naming system to make it easy to span.
Wow. Amazing that this page exists virtually unchanged from 30 years ago.
We've definitely lost some part of the charm of the early web when it was common to get email, web space, FTP, and even shell access from your ISP.
https://sdf.org if you want some of that back
Oh wow. That brings back memories. I think every site I built back then at least used that FormMail script.
Then we started transitioning to Lisp, and somehow ended up with PHP.
In any case, I don't think I'd be here without your help, Matt. Big, big thanks!
WWWBoard is such a nostalgia hit. My local music venue's forum was where my early internet persona originated. Sometimes I nostalgic and use Wayback machine to see what all my fellow teenagers were talking about 25 years ago.
Fun fact: WWWBoard had a brief cameo in the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- their official community site used the script for many years after most had moved on.
Here is the scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2NHTRgH3G0
(Caution very NSFW language)
You can still find some of these boards online. It's like seeing a thylacene crossing the street.
Another legendary throwback from that era:
https://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
wow, thanks Matt. You and Lincoln Stein (Bioperl founder if I remember correctly) got me started with my first website.
OMG. Just the name brings back memories.
I spent so much time hacking on scripts from here in the those early internet days... ahh memories.
I wonder how many users still pay for formmail.com
About 1,000 -- usage peaked in 2008. I never really added additional features or did the work that would have kept it relevant. It's mostly in maintenance mode and self-serve at this point.
That's great; it's always good to hear that someone who contributed so much value was able to get paid something for it.
In 1995-ish, I had just started working at a new ISP. My boss dropped Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days on my desk and said, "You need to learn to make guestbooks and things for our users." Your scripts were a big help in getting me up to speed.
CGI bin babbbyyyyyy
oh wow. This is one of those things that I remember, but I never would have thought of it specifically. Formmail.pl !
Ahhh, WWWBoard. Those were the days!
Last updated in (2009), it seems.