Introduction
Between 2008 and 2023, I worked as a content developer for the Scott College of Business, Indiana State University, creating designs and content for their web pages and electronic devices.
During my time there I got interested in the university's early web presence. Most, if not all of the early servers have been shut down, but luckily the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has saved many of the older pages.
Gopher
The earliest web presence of Indiana State I can find was a Gopher server that was created in January, 1993. All I know about it was that it was at gopher://newgopher.indstate.edu/ and that it contained "a variety of information, mostly of interest to the ISU community."
The Life Sciences gopher server was created in June 1994 and delivered a variety of information including the Computer Applications Proficiency Examination materials.
Early HTTP Presence
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine did not start collecting websites until May 1996, but as the earliest Indiana State University HTTP servers were created in the Spring of 1994, unless someone, somewhere has these very early pages archived somewhere, those are probably gone forever.
It appears that the department most responsible for providing the web sites, subdomains, and computational teaching technology from the mid-1990s was the Department of Life Science (DLS), Center for Biological Computing usually in association with the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Computing Resources Center. Although they had "limited resources and no permanent staff", their goal was to "provide access to the technologies and applications which can be incorporated into teaching." Services offered by the DLS included web space; HyperMail, a program that accepted E-Mail messages and generated a set of cross-referenced HTML documents; HyperNews, a package of software that supported conferencing on the internet; TeamWave, an application which provided a permanent, shared space for use by a class or other group; Web Course in a Box, which enabled instructors to set up web pages for a course; and WebCamToo, a webserver application which also served live video.
The page at Campus Information Servers (archived 1 April 1997), gives a list of some of the earliest servers and some of the information they contained.
The ISU Libraries web server (archived 8 May 1997) was developed in Spring, 1994 and was designed to take advantage of graphical navigation tools for access to electronic references throughout the Internet.
The ISU Career Center web server (archived 11 February 1997) began service in August 1996. Powered by a Power Macintosh 8550 Work Group Server. It ran the WebSTAR v1.2.4 web server software, and MapServe.acgi which was a CGI program to create server-side image maps. The server delivered news and information to students, alumni, faculty, and employers. They planned to update the server with listservs for discussion groups, searchable FileMaker Pro databases, and online student and employer registrations. The site was created using Adobe Photoshop 2.5, Aldus SuperPaint 3.5, GIF Converter 2.3.7, OmniPage text scanner, JOVE unix editor, and some JAVA scripts.
The Faculty Computing Resource Center (archived 4 November 1996) existed to aid faculty and staff to incorporate technology into the curriculum.
The Life Sciences web server (archived 10 December 1997, but by then the page had become Indiana State University's home page) began service in the Summer of 1994. It offered CUSeeMe video conferencing tools and archives, the archives of the Association of Midwest College Biology Teachers, and an ftp archive for DOS and Linux software. This server also houses a number of home pages of individuals associated with Indiana State University, students, faculty, staff, and otherwise affiliated. These were hosted on the subdomains Thunder (archived 8 December 1996) and Mama (archived 19 February 1999).
The Purchasing Department web server (archived 30 December 1996) began service in December, 1994. The site covers policies and procedures for the purchase of equipment by University departments. Dave Tutton's page on the server shows some of the softare used to make and maintain it.
Dr. Bialaszewski's WebServer (archived 22 December 1996) first came into existence late 1995 as an experimental server. It used Apache web server running on a Gateway 2000 computer with an Intel Pentium Processor running at 75Mhz. It was used as a teaching tool for Management Information Systems students in various classes on the usage of Unix as well as HTML editing and other Internet related topics. The server also served as a home for some of ISU's students, faculties, and organizations. It was last archived on 15 May 1998.
The Center for Teaching & Learning has had a set of pages from at least August 1997 (archived 16 January 1998).
Subdomains
Indiana State University has run several subdomains over the years. If you are interested enough to go to some of the Internet Archive links and go through te timeline you may notice that some pages redirect to a different subdomain. This is because as a site's design changed, it was usually devloped on a separate one and the old one redirected to that once it was complete. Here's some of the subdomains I know about:
Amber
Amber was a Novell NetWare 6 instance that the Internet Archive saved from 13 June 2003 to 25 January 2005. It doesn't seem to have been used for anything.
Baby
Biology
Emerald
FCRC
The Faculty Computing Resource Center (archived 4 November 1996) existed to aid faculty and staff to incorporate technology into the curriculum. The subdomain appears to have only been used for their pages and the last time it was archived, without being redirected, was on 2 September 2000. On 26 May 2002, the Internet Archive shwed a new server, FCRCweb.FTR starting. This was home to the Faculty Computing Resource Center.
Homeroom
Homeroom was saved by the Internet Archive from 20 December 1996 to 10 September 2019, but parts of it date from 1995. It was created by the Department of Life Science, Center for Biological Computing in association with the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Computing Resources Center and was used to describe computational teaching technology
This included applications such as HyperMail, a program that accepted E-Mail messages and generated a set of cross-referenced HTML documents; HyperNews, a package of software that supported conferencing on the internet; TeamWave, an application which provided a permanent, shared space for use by a class or other group; Web Course in a Box, which enabled instructors to set up web pages for a course; and WebCamToo, a webserver application which also served live video.
The server was also home to several classes.
Jessie
Jessie (archived 22 December 1996) was Dr. Dennis Bialaszewski's Web Server and first came into existence late 1995 as an experimental server. It used Apache web server running on a Gateway 2000 computer with an Intel Pentium Processor running at 75Mhz. It was used as a teaching tool for Management Information Systems students in various classes on the usage of Unix as well as HTML editing and other Internet related topics. The server also served as a home for some of ISU's students, faculties, and organizations. It was last archived on 15 May 1998.
Part of Dr. Dennis Bialaszewski's Jessie homepage
Library
Mama
Odin
Papa
Physiol
Purchasing
Sapphire
Sapphire was the successor to the Thunder server and served much the same purpose. It was saved by the Internet Archive from 19 January 2000 until March 2025, but devlopment seems to have stopped some time in 2008. It was run by the Office of Internet Technology (OIT) and ran Apache web server. None of the student pages were saved by the Internet Archive but interestingly the server ran AWStats log traffic analyzer, and those pages from 2004 to 2006 are available.
Spot
Spot was another server run by the Department of Life Science, Center for Biological Computing in association with the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Computing Resources Center. It appears to have been active about the same time as the Homeroom server and so similar I'm not sure if they were mirrors of each other.
Thunder
Thunder was a "home page server" set up by the ACNS department and used specifically to host home pages created by Indiana State University students and organizations. It was saved by the Internet Archive between 8 December 1996 and 25 September 2002. It actually ran from 1 August 1996 and was removed from service at the end of 1999. Oddy, a page on the server says that anything left on the server at the end of "1999 was converted to free electrons (deleted), and the server itself was dismantled."
The server was running Linux Slackware 2.1, running on 1.1.72 Kernel. It had 32MB of real memory and 24MB of swap for a total of 56MB of virtual memory. The server software was WN HTTP Server and had 6 licenses for WordPerfect 5.1. Students could create their account and use StatBot statistics and have a Count counter. Instructions for all of this was on the server.
The server also ran a copy of WWWStat, and a page of those statistics from 1 January 1996 to 8 December 1996 were captured by the Internet Archive.
A list of students and organizations that had pages on the server was also provided.
The Sapphire server replaced Thunder when it was taken out of service.
WEB, WWW1 & WWW2
web.indstate.edu was first archived on 10 December 1997. After 28 February 2008 most pages were rdirected to indstate.edu. www1.indstate.edu was first archived on 5 January 1997 and most pages are redirected to indstate.edu. The same for www2.indstate.edu.
Interesting Pages
While working at the university and writing this page, I came across pages that were unusual or intersting in other ways...
An interesting page is the one showing the server statistics archived on 5 February 1998. At some point the log statistics program WWWStat was run on the servers.
The Changing Web Face of ISU
The following pages can be found on the Internet Archive. The following screenshots are from March 1996 to June 2013.
After June 2013, Indiana State University moved to a Content Management System (CMS) and the homepage has stayed the same, but sometimes with major changes, since then.
The Changing Web Face of the College of Business
Like many other institutions the Scott College of Business has grown and changed over the years. Its beginning was the formation of the Commerce Department at Indiana State Normal School in 1918. It was located in the Old Main building and chaired by Shepherd Young. In 1940, it moved to second floor of Fine Arts and Commerce Building.
In 1962, it was renamed as the Department of Business Education and moved to the renovated Science Building, formerly known as the Classroom Building, on north side of the quadrangle. The department was later renamed as the Division of Business.
In 1964, the School of Business was created with Dr. Paul Muse as dean. Dr. Muse was the Chairman of the Department of Commerce from 1947 to 1964. Dr. Muse remained as dean until his retirement in 1971.
In 1980, the School of Business was relocated to Statesman Towers on Sycamore between 8th and 9th streets. In 2004, the School was renamed as a College, and in 2010, renamed again to the Scott College of Business. In August 2012, it moved into a home in downtown Terre Haute - Federal Hall.
Click here for a slightly fuller history of the Scott College of Business.
The first indstate.eu/business pages were archived on 12 January 1998. This seems to be an unfinished attempt as it is a text only page with only two working links, one to the Accounting and the other to the Systems and Decision Sciences departments.
A better School of Business site appeared at indstate.edu/schbus, which was first archived on 22 April 2003. The homepage was changed to the College of Business on 13 October 2004. The last time that was archived was on 8 November 2007. After that the page was redirected back to ww1.indstate.eu/business
Pages from indstate.edu/schbus
The following images were taken from www1.indstate.edu/business
Sources & Resources
Adobe Photoshop 2.5 - Web Design Museum
Aldus SuperPaint 3.5 - Cryan
GIF Converter - Gryphel Project
Gopher (protocol) - Wikipedia
HyperMail (Internet Archive)
HyperNews (Internet Archive)
Internet Archive
JOVE - Wikipedia
NetWare - Wikipedia
OmniPage Page Univesity of California, Berkeley
Power Macintosh 8500 - Wikipedia
TeamWave (Internet Archive)
Wayback Machine
Web Course in a Box - Virginia Commonwealth University (Internet Archive)
WebCamToo (Internet Archive)
WebSTAR - Wikipedia
What Were Server-Side Image Maps? - Rick Carlino
WN Server - Northwestern University (Internet Archive)
WWWStat - University of California, Irvine (Internet Archive)