Mink Machine turns 20 years old

Twenty years ago, I wrote the first lines of HTML for this site. This was a time when the Web was a strange little frontier populated mostly by academics, geeks and people who thought blink tags might actually be a good idea. Netscape hadn’t arrived yet. Internet Explorer wasn’t even a glint in Microsoft’s eye. There were no social networks, no influencers, no cookie banners asking permission to sell your soul to seventeen advertising companies. It was, in other words, a simpler and considerably uglier time.

The World Wide Web itself turned 25 this year. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee sent his now-famous proposal to his boss at CERN, who reportedly described it as “vague but exciting”. Not a bad description of the entire Internet, really.

Since then I’ve watched the Web mutate from a collection of grey pages with blue links into something that has transformed how we work, communicate, shop, travel, argue with complete strangers and look at photographs of other people’s lunches.

Advertising for Martians.

And somehow, Mink Machine survived all of it. Over the years I’ve written more than 400 entries here, along with another 300-plus movie reviews at Dubbeldissarklubben. That represents an alarming amount of time spent staring into glowing rectangles and convincing myself this counted as a productive activity.

Blogging itself has been declared dead several times by now. Apparently we were all supposed to abandon our own little corners of the Internet and move into somebody else’s walled garden, where an algorithm decides whether anyone gets to see what we write.

My own posting frequency has certainly declined as well. Life intervenes. There are planes to catch, cities to get lost in and increasingly persuasive reasons not to spend Saturday night debugging CSS.

But the site is still here. Twenty years. Countless redesigns, dead links, questionable opinions and bits of HTML that probably deserve to be taken behind the shed and quietly put out of their misery.

It’s been a hell of a ride. Here’s looking at you, site. Try not to crash.