Alex Churchill’s old homepage opens with purple sheep, an elephant on a pogo stick, a reversed e-mail invitation, and an offer to take an armadillo.
Nobody can accuse it of withholding personality.
Visit Alex Churchill’s old homepage
Churchill later added an unusually useful warning: the website is very out of date, many images are missing, most pages have not been updated for years, and his interests changed.
Then he left it online.
That decision turned an obsolete homepage into a much better historical artifact.
A person, not a profile
The site comes from Churchill’s student years at Cambridge and sprawls across exactly the categories personal homepages once encouraged people to invent for themselves.
There are collections of strange things said by mathematics and computer-science lecturers. There are years of quotes from friends. There are pages about Christianity, the Cambridge Assassins’ Guild, Diplomacy, Magic: The Gathering, the Odd Squad, computer games, silly songs, photographs, and a Diplomacy variant set in Cambridge.
At one point Churchill explains that he built Linux shell scripts to search Magic card rulings.
Elsewhere he lists games he loved, including Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VIII, StarCraft, Civilization, Mario 64, UFO: Enemy Unknown, and Worms.
None of this has been compressed into a professional biography.
That is why it works.
Modern social profiles encourage a continuous present: the old post slides down, the avatar changes, the current self replaces the previous one. A static personal homepage can accidentally preserve an entire obsolete version of a person.
Churchill’s page openly acknowledges that condition rather than fixing it.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal pages because they preserve a form of web authorship that was less concerned with consistency and much more willing to be weird in public.
This homepage is outdated.
That is now its best feature.