The dftuz.unizar.es pages, 1993–2005

Recovered in September 2026 from a tarball of August 2000 and a server copy of November 2005

On 12 August 2000 two directories of the department's web server were packed into WEBvaria.tar.gz and WEBanarq.tar.gz, and the files kept their original dates. They resurfaced in a copy of an old workstation, and they hold the two parts of my first website that the early-web page could so far only cite from other people's archives: the wwwlab experiments (1994–1997) and the Flexion archive. Both are published here as they were, converted to UTF-8 and otherwise untouched. Links to the outside web of 1996 are left as they were written; most of them are dead. The earliest file is a coat-of-arms image dated 20 December 1993, the day the university server is said to have gone online.

wwwlab: “DFTUZ WWW laboratories”, 1994–1997

A working directory of experiments with the web as it stood between Mosaic and HTML 3.2. The index page announces them in two languages: DFTUZ WWW labs. Everything here was written by me, signed rivero@sol.unizar.es.

• Backlinks from the server side: on-fly capture and insertionthe paper, 16 December 1996. A CGI script catches the HTTP referer at the moment a page is served and writes it beside the file, so the page can advertise who links to it through LINK or A elements. The early-web page's quoted www-talk correspondence names this file as still to be recovered; this is it.
• Who is pointing to you?the November 1996 experience report with the mini-script, and PutBacks, the CGI itself, for CERN httpd 3.0.
• The referrer logsthe .backs files the script wrote are kept next to each page as plain text. The one for the EZLN ballot records links from Mexico, Germany, Japan and Metacrawler queries; the one for the backlinks page records a Usenet announcement and the www-annotation list at W3C.
• CERN cache en DFTUZrunning the CERN httpd as server and caching proxy on the same port, with the plan to move to Apache.
• Local network trafficSNMPv1 statistics of the link from the Zaragoza router to RedIRIS in Madrid, and round-trip times to Madrid and to SISSA in Trieste, updated daily “until they closed the public access to the SNMP information in routers”.
• Recursos Internet en Españaa map of Spanish internet resources that works without an imagemap server, by cropping the image into tiles inside a PRE block; tested with xmosaic 2.4 and Lynx. The 1994 overlays proposal is the same idea one year earlier.
• wwwcarda Hypercard-like active image built from tiles, with questions to Mac users and “WWW gurus” about turning it into a client-side alternative to imagemap; and a test of the FIG element beside the Zaragoza maps page for visitors.
• Consulta Internacional EZLNa web ballot for the international consultation called by the Zapatistas on 8 June 1995, with the call and the Convención Nacional Democrática letter of 30 June 1995. The most linked page of the server, by its own referrer log.

Left out: a mirror of the HTML 2.0 specification, and two search forms for a documentation database, which belonged to other people. A small photo album of the department's young physicists (1993–1995) survives in the same tarball and stays private.

Flexion: “archivos ideológicos”, 1995–1998

Flexion was an archive and distribution service for texts on “the conflict between power and freedom”, with an emphasis on anarchism, cooperativism and syndicalism, run from the department server's sector externo and signed as an individual initiative. It borrowed the shape of the Los Alamos preprint archive: sections named anarq-th, anarq-ph, anarq-dc, left-gen and pwr-misc, papers numbered 95001, 96002, an abstract file for each, quarterly listings, and a mailing list, flexion@dftuz.unizar.es, that announced the new documents. The about page explains why a physicist kept it (Eric Raymond's use of Kropotkin in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Weinberg's Psychology of Computer Programming, and Albareda's 1939 report on the physicists of Cabrera's school). Reception of new texts closed in January 1997; the list itself was still answering subscribers in 2004.

• Archives indexthe sections and their abstracts, from Juan Peiró's syndicalism to Bookchin, Mondragón and a chronology of Spanish anarchism.
• Acerca de Flexion and the methodwhat it was for, and how the quarterly updates worked from October 1996.
• Kropotkin on science and educationextracts from Fields, Factories and Workshops, the passage that the about page points to.
• Listingsthe quarterly announcements from September 1995 to the third quarter of 1996.
• Trilogía de la civilización prácticathe announcement of a three-part manual “for developers of sensible villages”, 1997.

What is published here is my own part of the archive: the index and about pages, the method, the listings, and the abstract and README files that catalogue each document (title, author, sender, distribution note). The document bodies themselves, some forty scanned or forwarded texts by other authors, are held back for now; their titles and authors remain readable in the catalogue.

The ~rivero homepage as it stood in November 2005

A second find in the same old workstation is the document root of http://dftuz.unizar.es/~rivero/ itself, copied on 10 November 2005 when the department's server was retired: 761 files, from the 1994 preprints to the Ciclorail photographs of August 2005. It is published at /online/recovered/dftuz-home/ with its own index page, the bilingual “Mini Homepage at dftuz”, and its sections research, polit, bici (Ciclorail) and bin (the arXiv iterated-references tool and its scripts). About a quarter of the files stay private: the CV in six formats, a student project that names its authors, a thesis adviser's draft notes, forwarded mail, the working data of the nuclear mass-formula project, third-party papers and songs, the full-size photographs and videos of Ciclorail, and a scanned comic strip. Other people's e-mail addresses quoted in the published pages were replaced by “[correo omitido]”.

• The 1995 PhD thesisUniversidad de Zaragoza, as the PDF that sat on the server.
• Genealogía de físicos teóricosthe tree of Spanish theoretical physicists, opening with Blas Cabrera's school; already linked from the front page, now from its original location.
• Physics of Ownershipthe essay the early-web page cites from a surviving mirror.
• ¿Necesitamos un subjectclass?a proposal for an econophysics subject class on arXiv.
• Open letter on the Archimedes palimpsestto a journal editor, after the 1998 rediscovery.
• The 115 GeV signal from nuclear physics30 July 2004; the nuclear-pattern conjecture in its first form.
• Ciclorailthe bicycle on the abandoned Caminreal–Calatayud line: pages, small photographs and EXIF dates of 3 to 21 August 2005; “the twelfth chapter of the eleven being broadcast on television about vías verdes”.
• Overproduction goal, or why property is thiefan essay comparing the economic principles of anarchism with capitalist and “real socialist” economies, from the politics branch; it sat as a hidden file on the server.
• The Challenge of MondragonGeorge Benello’s essay from Reinventing Anarchy Again (AK Press, 1996), mirrored on the politics branch in the 1990s and kept here because no other copy could be found online; Kropotkin’s Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal, mirrored beside it, is left to the Anarchist Library.
• Cronología and Joaquín Costaa nineteenth-century labour-history chronology and an essay on Costa, from the politics branch.
• The homepage textwhich quotes a BITNET message of 10 September 1990 about the HP-48, the earliest dated trace of being online, found again through a search-engine cache.

What the dates say

Related here: the early-web page for the correspondence around these experiments; the participation theme in the bookmarks; and the chronology, where the 1995 and 1996 entries can now point at surviving originals.

Elsewhere: the Wayback Machine’s first capture of the homepage, 29 January 1997; the documentation of CERN httpd, the server the backlink scripts were written for; the 2001 interviews and the talk notes that tell the same story from memory; and the reading trail, where several of the sites bookmarked from this server in 1996 and 1997 are still kept.