About Motman's Hideaway

My dad was an internet pioneer, and made these sites in the late 90s, and his pseudonym was Motman (Tom backwards, which is also where I got my namesame 'THENATHE', see if you can guess!). He would recall to me that the first thing he did on the internet was look at library catalogues, especially for the library of congress and small obscure towns. He described how the speed was measured in baud (pronounced BOD) and it was a measure of how fast text could show up. This was back in the days of text based everything, like Web 0.5 for those of you that know that kind of terminology. Anyway, the other thing he did was also very old school, and it was IRC. The astitute among you might realize that 'Discord' is essentially the same thing as modern day IRC, and you would be absolutely correct (and like my father, I am enamored with it and use it as my primary form of communication with friends and people far and wide).

Back on topic, these sites were my dad's personal blog and it's evolution over the years. In order to recover these, I had to write a program to access the Wayback Machine (internet archive) and download LITERALLY every file. Then, I took all of those files and combined them into one large folder with advancing names, kept one of each unique copy of each file, and then peaced together all of the broken links and stuff to make sure it all went together smoothly. Just today (11/12/23) I went back to see if there was anything I missed and lo and behold the original "Motman's Hideaway" was completely gone! Looks like it got deleted or something, which means it is a really good thing I got to it when I did. I only wish I had gotten to it sooner, maybe there would be more or more complete information.

Anyway, the final note is that, if you notice, on each of these sites it says something like "Best viewed in 800x600 resolution". I thought this was really neat and a fun marker of exactly how old these sites are, so I made two windows in iframes, the left of which targets the right (just the way my dad always did it), and, when you go to one of these older pages, and then inserted some custom code that displays the right iframe (where the site is located) in 800x600, but when clicking on a page like this, or a page like the "Welcome" or "Comments" pages, it will display the normal proper width. Neat!