A life online

Alejandro Rivero · an expanding record of internet activity since 1992, with earlier traces

This is an attempt to gather the things I have written, built and discussed on the internet, and to link back to them. Papers and software are part of that history, alongside questions, unfinished conjectures, conversations, personal websites and small experiments.

The chronology follows the years, beginning with a recovered 1989 Info-Mac message. These subject pages offer other ways through the material.

Explore by subject

• Interests by period, 1989–2026the themes of each period of the chronology, with the dated evidence for each: mail folders, subscriptions, bookmarks, lists, writings, papers and code
• Early networks and the Webuniversity homepages, HTML experiments, backlinks, HTTP and early internet communities
• Computing, devices and open hardwareLibertonia, webcam mice, ciclorail, Librie and iLiad development, video transcripts
• Physics and mathematics in publicUsenet, Physics Forums, Not Even Wrong, Musings and the String Coffee Table
• Questions and answersStack Exchange and MathOverflow, from physics to teaching, astronomy, AI and fiction
• History, culture and societymanga, atomism, the Grail, Kropotkin, ancient geography, folklore and 15M
• Conjectures and conspiracy theoriesa deliberately overlapping index: ice and chirality, hidden histories, causal guesses, criticism and corrections
• Websites, journals and identitiesthe ~rivero pages, GeoCities, Blogia, community diaries and later profiles

Collections, by source

Bodies of material recovered whole from old servers, laptops and browser profiles, each with an index of its own. The subject pages above pick from them; these are the complete sets.

• Bookmarks by theme, 1995–20262,200 recovered browser bookmarks sorted into the subjects they belong to: what was being read behind the papers, the code and the conjectures
• The dftuz.unizar.es pages, 1993–2005the first website: wwwlab experiments, the Flexion archive and the ~rivero homepage as copied in 2005
• Escritos del libretto, 1996–200573 texts recovered from a late-1990s laptop: folklore and history essays, short fiction and poems, opinion, physics notes, and the 2001 interviews on the beginnings of the Internet in Aragón
• Posts to mailing lists, 1997–199875 of my own posts to MEMORIA, FEEL, the World Systems Network and RA-L, recovered from sent mail
• El último hovercraft, 2005–2006the ciberpunk.net blog republished, 139 posts
• Talks and slides, 2003–2016ten recovered decks: free-model extensions, Zivis and Ibercivis, Hurriquest, scraping, political activity on networks
• Recovered web experiments, 2008–2012camera widgets, Ibercivis before launch, GraphEvent, Twitter stickers, seasonal searches and collective-intelligence interfaces; restored from local archives
• Extracts from the 2008 CVcomputing before the online archive, stays and conference travel, with the discrepancies against later accounts kept visible

Another way through the archive is geographical: places and journeys, with documented stays and a growing travel wish list.

Connections across the years

For a fuller record beyond the selections, the Stack Exchange inventory links 236 public posts across 23 communities, with dates and separate question and answer counts.

• From the 1997 photosynthesis question to the 2004 essay on ice and chiralitya surviving later treatment of an earlier question whose link was lost
• From GeoCities to Conjeturasships, constellations and memory, carried from one site to another
• From PDG plots in a blog discussion to pdghistdecay-width data in 2006 and the later repository documenting changing particle measurements
• AI questions before the conversations with Bingbandit problems in 2018, attention and architecture in 2022
• Mathematics for childrenthe 2018 set-and-arithmetic questions alongside the later calculators

Longer reading paths

For longer reading paths, these recurring interests cross the subject boundaries. They are editorial connections between surviving work, not claims that every later project was already planned in the earliest text.

• Interfaces that let people think and act. Text-readable maps in 1994 → the webcam mouse → electronic-paper readers → calculator and watch-keypad questions in 2025. The shared question is how a useful idea becomes something a person can operate.
• What survives in memory, and how to retrieve it. Stars and mnemonic catalogues → searchable video transcripts → distilling knowledge into models → experiments with layerwise learning. These are different mechanisms, connected here by the interest in preserving and recovering knowledge.
• Economics, networks and collective decisions. Physics of Ownership → the informal 15M history and network-analysis papers → collective intelligence and opinion dynamics. A route through social questions that the physics-only reading of this archive misses.
• How to teach an abstraction. Reconstructing ancient mathematics → sets, addition and New Math in 2018 → the Python course → calculators for children. Historical reconstruction, classroom questions and working tools remain distinct activities.
• From discrete approximations to physical laws. The 1993 geometry question → spectral triples and numerical-analysis preprints → the 2024 Planck-area question → the refinement research workspace. Follow the changing formulations without treating current research proposals as settled results.
• Cooperation, ownership and the anarchist archive. The politica folder of 1995–1997 → Flexion, the “archivos ideológicos” → the Research on Anarchism list and FEEL → Physics of Ownership → Sobre el apoyo mutuo y el capital → the electronic Conquista del pan → Prehistoria del 15M and the participation bookmarks. Reading, archiving and arguing about cooperation, from a department server in 1995 to the squares of 2011.
• Folklore, myth and oral tradition. The MEMORIA posts of 1998 → the libretto essays on the Cave of Salamanca, the Basque legends and the four-corners prayer → Bedtime prayers, the sky and ritual and the Grail → Múra-Pirahã and the interpretation of folklore → languages, scripts and antiquity in the later bookmarks. The same legends, first argued on a mailing list, then written up, then revisited with new sources.
• Citizen science and volunteer computing. Zivis at Hispalinux, 2007 → Ibercivis before launch, 2008 → Ibercivis in IberGrid and EDGeS, 2009 → the grid, cloud and citizen-science bookmarks → collective intelligence and the Kampal years. Volunteer computers first, then volunteer opinions: the same interest in what many people's machines and judgements can do together.
• Fiction beside the physics. Brin, Bear and Mars Pathfinder in 1997 → the libretto stories, poems and the Foundation synopsis → El último hovercraft → Science Fiction and Worldbuilding on Stack Exchange. Reading and writing fiction has run alongside the research the whole time; this path collects the traces.
• The beginnings of the Internet in Aragón. The department server, 1993–1997 → the ISOC Aragón record → Del Mac al Spectrum, the 2001 interviews → notes for a talk on the beginnings of the Internet in Zaragoza → mail clients 1993–2021 and the address table. A local history told from one desk: the machines, the addresses and the people who set them up.

Reading this archive

Entries distinguish original posts, copies, quotations in replies and later reports. An archive capture date is not the original publication date. Undated pages stay undated; a documented old address is kept even when its content has not yet been recovered. Older conjectures are described as such, including corrections where they survive.

The topic pages were expanded on 20 September 2026 and the collections and reading paths on 21 September 2026. The chronology also contains earlier link checks: its old “live” and “archived” labels are not a promise that every destination is accessible today. This is a static HTML index; following a source link takes you to that site's own copy.

Names and addresses in the older record

Most contributions use Alejandro Rivero or arivero. The GeoCities homepage signs Jannos, links my university research pages, and has an inner essay signed Alejandro Rivero; the same pseudonym, Jannos Neumann, ran the 1998 Windows refund campaign. Historical mail addresses are useful search keys, not current contact addresses. The sequence below was read off the surviving mail of 1993–2007 in September 2026, with two 1999 addresses added from the Libretto on 22 September.

Sources: the surviving mail stores (private), the HTTP working-group message, webcam project, ISOC record, GeoCities mirror, and the 2002 spectral-triples note.

Still to recover

For other people's research notebooks and personal archives, see the reading trail of related personal pages.

There are still gaps in the early 1990s, broken Usenet message links, and missing individual entries from Barrapunto and Kuro5hin. The university site's wwwlab tree and PAPER224.html were recovered in September 2026 and are published under the dftuz.unizar.es pages. Still to recover: contributions under the Telefónica and posta.unizar.es addresses, Yahoo-group material, and the full history of later social accounts. A year without an entry means a gap in this index, not necessarily a year without activity.