Regarding the url of old fansites

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
Fireminer
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Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by Fireminer »

A long time ago, I noticed when looking through the various pre-2000 anime fansites that some of them are hosted by colleges, which are indicated by their url. I am not an American so I have no idea how can you get permission from your college to create a non-academic website that has the college's domain. Also, is this matter anyway related to the college anime clubs, which, according to what I have read, were important to the early anime fans.

(Related to the matter, I did remember that a lot of the aforementioned fansites have the ".utah." domain to them. When I asked around, some people responded that before California became the capital of geeks, Utah was where the majority of them gathered. Is this true, or just a stereotype?)
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by davemerrill »

I wasn't hosting websites at the time, but in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, universities were where the internet was happening, both in terms of users being students who were given access through university computer services, and the software itself being developed at various institutions. If you weren't a college student, your internet access was through a service like AOL or CompuServe or GEnie, or local amateur BBS systems.

I do know that many anime fan websites were based on university systems for several reasons... maybe university anime clubs were given hosting space on the university servers, or fans in the computer science department were allowed to build websites as projects, or somebody on the faculty was sympathetic... but to a large degree, the anime fan site were on .edu servers simply because there were a lot of .edu servers out there.

I'm sure someone who was actually maintaining websites at the time will show up and correct my assumptions. I was one of those GEnie/BBS people who had no idea who or what HTML was.
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by davemerrill »

Also, in terms of Utah being some kind of "geek capital", well, nope, not in terms of anime fandom. You can see where the anime clubs were in the 1980s for a decent metric of where the fandom activity was happening, and those places were California, Florida, Texas, the NYC area, Boston... there were anime fans in Utah, just like everywhere else, but it certainly wasn't known for its fan activity.
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by mbanu »

Might you be remembering UT? UT is the state abbreviation for Utah, but is also a common abbreviation for "University of [T-something]"; for instance, it is the university abbreviation for the University of Texas system, which had a lot of anime clubs, such as this one at the University of Texas Arlington: https://web.archive.org/web/19970620033 ... rgs/anime/
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by Drew_Sutton »

davemerrill wrote:
Fireminer wrote: A long time ago, I noticed when looking through the various pre-2000 anime fansites that some of them are hosted by colleges, which are indicated by their url. I am not an American so I have no idea how can you get permission from your college to create a non-academic website that has the college's domain. Also, is this matter anyway related to the college anime clubs, which, according to what I have read, were important to the early anime fans.
I wasn't hosting websites at the time, but in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, universities were where the internet was happening, both in terms of users being students who were given access through university computer services, and the software itself being developed at various institutions. If you weren't a college student, your internet access was through a service like AOL or CompuServe or GEnie, or local amateur BBS systems.

I do know that many anime fan websites were based on university systems for several reasons... maybe university anime clubs were given hosting space on the university servers, or fans in the computer science department were allowed to build websites as projects, or somebody on the faculty was sympathetic... but to a large degree, the anime fan site were on .edu servers simply because there were a lot of .edu servers out there.
Dave's right about how universities were some of the best places for Internet access and how pioneering they were in its use. Anime clubs had access to, if they opted to take it, funds and services provided by the universities for other social or intramural clubs and organizations, which would have been some nominal web space on university servers. Starting in the 1990s, students' email addresses could be used for Usenet or other BBS subscriptions (culminating in Eternal September) and universities also allotted students personal web space on university networks.

I'll ask my local greybeard tomorrow if he knows better how the nitty-gritty worked; he worked on UNIX and BSD systems for Emory from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. He came from academia prior to that, so I bet he knows that side of the systems stuff, too.
mbanu wrote:
fireminer wrote: (Related to the matter, I did remember that a lot of the aforementioned fansites have the ".utah." domain to them. When I asked around, some people responded that before California became the capital of geeks, Utah was where the majority of them gathered. Is this true, or just a stereotype?)
Might you be remembering UT? UT is the state abbreviation for Utah, but is also a common abbreviation for "University of [T-something]"; for instance, it is the university abbreviation for the University of Texas system,
I don't think it had anything to do with Universities of Utah or Texas or Tennessee but I too remember the ".utah." subdomain. I may be having some fandom Mandela affect, though - I feel like I've had a couple of those lately. It might have been a Geocities or Angelfire or some other web hosting service's subdomain pointing to a cluster of servers (and it just seems like a bunch of anime websites ended up in that cluster). Without an example domain in front of me, though, I can't for the life of me remember more than that.
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by davemerrill »

thanks Drew, I think that's the phrase I was wanting to use, that "universities also allotted students personal web space on university networks."

This was way before you could just call up GoDaddy and say "gimme hosting space". If you weren't a university, a corporation with the need for networking and storage capacity, or the government, what would you need to host a website for?

We started organizing our anime con (AWA) in 1994 and at the time people were already saying "hey, you need to have a website" - fans being fans, there were people in the organization that were ahead of the curve in terms of technology and were excited about the new developments.

Anyway, my response was, "What for? How many people would be able to *see* a website we built? Sure, college students around the world with access to web browsers in their university computer labs will sure enjoy seeing our website. But apart from the Ga Tech and UGA students, they aren't going to come to our convention." I wanted to be practical about these things, so our online advertising was mostly posts on various Usenet groups like rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.anime.info and rec.arts.anime.misc, etc. which honestly did a pretty good job of getting the word out, and cost us nothing.

It was 1998 before we had an actual website for AWA, and two minutes after it went live, we had people telling us that it sucked and that *they* could build a better one. Which they probably could, but as we told people, we were interested in the anime convention end of things, not the website building end of things.

I know the first AWA address was http://www.anime.net/~awa/main.html (I don't know who owned "anime.net" or where it was hosted) but by 2000 we had the domain "www-awa-con.com" and it's been that way ever since.
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by Fireminer »

Drew_Sutton wrote: Tue Jul 17, 2018 7:06 pm
davemerrill wrote: I wasn't hosting websites at the time, but in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, universities were where the internet was happening, both in terms of users being students who were given access through university computer services, and the software itself being developed at various institutions. If you weren't a college student, your internet access was through a service like AOL or CompuServe or GEnie, or local amateur BBS systems.

I do know that many anime fan websites were based on university systems for several reasons... maybe university anime clubs were given hosting space on the university servers, or fans in the computer science department were allowed to build websites as projects, or somebody on the faculty was sympathetic... but to a large degree, the anime fan site were on .edu servers simply because there were a lot of .edu servers out there.
Dave's right about how universities were some of the best places for Internet access and how pioneering they were in its use. Anime clubs had access to, if they opted to take it, funds and services provided by the universities for other social or intramural clubs and organizations, which would have been some nominal web space on university servers. Starting in the 1990s, students' email addresses could be used for Usenet or other BBS subscriptions (culminating in Eternal September) and universities also allotted students personal web space on university networks.

I'll ask my local greybeard tomorrow if he knows better how the nitty-gritty worked; he worked on UNIX and BSD systems for Emory from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. He came from academia prior to that, so I bet he knows that side of the systems stuff, too.
mbanu wrote: Might you be remembering UT? UT is the state abbreviation for Utah, but is also a common abbreviation for "University of [T-something]"; for instance, it is the university abbreviation for the University of Texas system,
I don't think it had anything to do with Universities of Utah or Texas or Tennessee but I too remember the ".utah." subdomain. I may be having some fandom Mandela affect, though - I feel like I've had a couple of those lately. It might have been a Geocities or Angelfire or some other web hosting service's subdomain pointing to a cluster of servers (and it just seems like a bunch of anime websites ended up in that cluster). Without an example domain in front of me, though, I can't for the life of me remember more than that.
Thank you so much for your answers. Not only were my questions answered, but I now know more than that. It is kind of surreal for we young people to talk about the Internet in the early 1990s.

From what I have seen, almost all of the 1990s HTML anime sites I have found that are still accessible today are encyclopedias, such as Raven's Garage and Shawn & Graham's Macross World. According to your answer, can I presume that only after webhosting became commonplace (during the mid-1990s?) that these data repositories were born. Or had the American anime community before then already had got the idea of preserving the data of their favorite shows beyond safekeeping the magazines? Were there encyclopedias or something similar on Usenet?
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by davemerrill »

in terms of encyclopedia style collections of information about Japanese animation, there were several sources prior to fansites on the World Wide Web.

-Professional magazines like Animerica, Anime UK, etc. The magazine Animag spent most of its first 15 or 20 issues covering Zeta Gundam in great detail (this material was later extracted and published on its own in a "bootleg" photocopy edition).

-Fanzines published by various fan clubs would frequently print synopses of films and TV shows, translations of episodes or movies, character guides, etc.

Some fan clubs would have separate photocopied packets of this information that they would mail out to members. Amateur Press Associations (APAs) devoted to anime would also feature translations and guides to anime series, but distribution of APAs was limited to members only.

-The 1986 Baycon guide, distributed by the C/FO, featured descriptions of dozens of anime films and TV series.

In the mid to late 1980s translated scripts and synopses would be shared as text files. Our local Atlanta GA club was getting translations of things like Iczer One as text files from various anime bulletin board systems.


Many BBSes had file areas where images and text files could be stored and downloaded. The Usenet newsgroups had a category of 'binary' newsgroups where files would be separated into smaller binary files which could be downloaded easily over your slow 300-baud dialup modem, and then assembled later.

This is bringing back all kinds of memories of using a super slow computer and a dialup modem to download translations and gif files from our local BBS, hoping nobody else in the house picked up the telephone. Somewhere I have a text file of nothing but translated episode titles that I transcribed from issues of the Baltimore anime club JASFA's newsletter, which made a point of listing every episode of every anime TV show screened at their meetings. (I never attended a JASFA meeting, but our clubs traded newsletters.)
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by usamimi »

Ah, I didn't realize you'd made a thread for these since you mentioned it in your intro, but here's what I posted there just to keep it on topic:
usamimi wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 1:14 pm Some long-time fansites that are still around that I know off the top of my head are http://ohtori.nu (Utena), http://www.furinkan.com (all things Rumiko Takahashi), http://www.logh.net/classic/about.htm (LOTGH), and http://ravensgarage.com (BGC). There's probably many more out there still floating around tho!
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Re: Regarding the url of old fansites

Post by Fireminer »

davemerrill wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 11:31 am in terms of encyclopedia style collections of information about Japanese animation, there were several sources prior to fansites on the World Wide Web.

-Professional magazines like Animerica, Anime UK, etc. The magazine Animag spent most of its first 15 or 20 issues covering Zeta Gundam in great detail (this material was later extracted and published on its own in a "bootleg" photocopy edition).

-Fanzines published by various fan clubs would frequently print synopses of films and TV shows, translations of episodes or movies, character guides, etc.

Some fan clubs would have separate photocopied packets of this information that they would mail out to members. Amateur Press Associations (APAs) devoted to anime would also feature translations and guides to anime series, but distribution of APAs was limited to members only.

-The 1986 Baycon guide, distributed by the C/FO, featured descriptions of dozens of anime films and TV series.

In the mid to late 1980s translated scripts and synopses would be shared as text files. Our local Atlanta GA club was getting translations of things like Iczer One as text files from various anime bulletin board systems.


Many BBSes had file areas where images and text files could be stored and downloaded. The Usenet newsgroups had a category of 'binary' newsgroups where files would be separated into smaller binary files which could be downloaded easily over your slow 300-baud dialup modem, and then assembled later.

This is bringing back all kinds of memories of using a super slow computer and a dialup modem to download translations and gif files from our local BBS, hoping nobody else in the house picked up the telephone. Somewhere I have a text file of nothing but translated episode titles that I transcribed from issues of the Baltimore anime club JASFA's newsletter, which made a point of listing every episode of every anime TV show screened at their meetings. (I never attended a JASFA meeting, but our clubs traded newsletters.)
Ah, so my suspicion is correct! I'd thought that in the old day, before all the information could be easily found in the Internet, anime fans were more concerned with keeping track of whatever they had absorbed in comparison to today's fans.

I know this is a bit out of topic, but could you please give me your assessment of the quality of the fanzines and fan-created internet archives of your time? I am trying to create a directory of the aforementioned websites, but I don't want include those which have mistranslated or even fabricated information.
usamimi wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 1:17 pm Ah, I didn't realize you'd made a thread for these since you mentioned it in your intro, but here's what I posted there just to keep it on topic:
usamimi wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 1:14 pm Some long-time fansites that are still around that I know off the top of my head are http://ohtori.nu (Utena), http://www.furinkan.com (all things Rumiko Takahashi), http://www.logh.net/classic/about.htm (LOTGH), and http://ravensgarage.com (BGC). There's probably many more out there still floating around tho!
Thanks! You're a great help.

Also, it's kind of surreal to talk to the creators of Let's Anime blog and the Anime Nostalgia Podcast, two of my favorite followings! You guys were among the first places people pointed me to when I talked about the 1990s anime scene to them.
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