Some personal homepages accidentally become archives. Ed Thelen’s site appears to have done it on purpose for about three decades.
Visit Ed Thelen’s Nike Missile site
Thelen wrote that he started the website in 1996. He had served in the Nike missile program in the Chicago defense area and later worked as an electronics and computer engineer. Instead of reducing that experience to a short biography, he built outward from it.
The result became a large technical and historical resource on Nike Ajax, Nike Hercules, radar, computers, missile sites, manuals, people, photographs and operating history.
It is exactly the sort of site the old web was unusually good at producing: one knowledgeable person deciding that an entire subject deserved a home.
Firsthand knowledge became infrastructure
The value is not just in the technical pages. The site also preserved correspondence and veteran memory. One old page discusses ways former Nike personnel might find one another online, including guestbooks and service-location lists. That is a reminder that before social networks centralized identity, specialist sites often served as the social graph for their own communities.
Thelen died in 2024, but the site did not simply freeze and rot. Its current stewardship page says Gregory Brown took responsibility for preserving the original material while continuing to add relevant Nike history. It specifically describes ongoing work involving U.S. Army Nike technical manuals held by the National Park Service archives at Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
That succession matters.
Independent websites often fail at exactly this point. The author dies, hosting expires, passwords disappear, and twenty years of accumulated specialist knowledge vanishes because nobody knew who was supposed to keep the lights on.
Ed-Thelen.org now explicitly has a preservation philosophy: keep the original work intact, make corrections conservatively, identify additions, and maintain public access.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of sites whose value is obvious only after you realize there may be no institutional substitute. This is one of those cases.
A veteran with engineering knowledge built a public reference site in 1996. Other veterans and researchers contributed. Decades later, somebody else stepped forward to steward it.
That is how a homepage becomes historical infrastructure.