The Cartographer of Lost Webs: How Gordon McKenna Saved the Early Internet
In 1996, the web felt both infinite and impossibly fragile. For every new Geocities page blinking into existence, a university project or a personal homepage would vanish without a trace, its domain registration lapsed, its creator moved on. This digital ephemerality was accepted as a natural law of the nascent internet—except by one man, a Scottish librarian named Gordon McKenna.
McKenna wasn’t a software engineer at a tech giant. He was an information scientist at the University of Strathclyde, and he saw the web not as a technological marvel, but as a cultural record in desperate need of a custodian. While others were looking forward, McKenna was looking sideways, observing the quiet disappearances. He began his work with the quiet diligence of a archivist, but his tools were a script and a server.
His project, which he humbly dubbed the ‘Internet History Project,’ was one of the first systematic attempts at web crawling for preservation, predating the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. McKenna’s crawler, ‘Moggy,’ would spend nights trawling a curated list of academic and cultural sites, downloading every page, every image, every link. He wasn’t capturing the entire web—an impossible task—but rather, he was creating a focused collection, a deliberate archive of what he deemed valuable and vulnerable.
The output wasn’t a sleek, user-friendly interface. It was a directory tree on a university server, a sprawling, unadorned collection of HTML files and GIFs. To access a preserved site, you had to know the exact path. It was preservation for preservation’s sake, a raw and honest backup of a digital moment. He was building a map, not for public use, but to prove the territory existed at all.
McKenna’s story is a poignant reminder of the human instinct behind preservation. Before ‘big data’ and institutional archives, there was often just one person who cared enough to act. His work was largely forgotten, subsumed by larger, more comprehensive efforts. But his legacy is the principle he embodied: that someone must be watching, must be collecting, must be the cartographer for worlds that are perpetually on the verge of being lost.
We think of digital preservation now as a field of complex protocols and petabyte-scale storage. But it began, as most important things do, with a single individual who saw a void and decided, quietly and without fanfare, to fill it. Gordon McKenna didn’t just save websites; he established the very ethos of the web archiver—the stubborn, hopeful belief that today’ digital fragments are tomorrow’s history.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: