Some fan sites survive long enough to become reference institutions. Ex Astris Scientia is one of them.
The site was launched by Bernd Schneider on January 21, 1998, originally on a university server. It began modestly: a handful of starship designs, a model review, early notes on time travel, some continuity problems, and jokes. By July of that year it had a name—Ex Astris Scientia—and was already becoming something much larger.
Today the site covers Star Trek starships, fictional technology, continuity investigations, episode reviews, production details, props, visual effects, real-world furniture and lighting used on sets, timelines, character information, fan designs, and long technical essays.
The good part is not merely that it is old. The good part is that it has continued to behave like a website.
Schneider describes EAS as privately owned, strictly noncommercial, handmade, and largely static. The site avoids advertising, sponsorship, tracking-heavy scripts, social-media widgets, and Google Analytics. Much of the HTML is still maintained directly, backed by custom scripts and utilities rather than a giant publishing platform.
That architecture fits the content. A database of fictional starships, an encyclopedia of warp technology, and an article comparing commercially available chairs seen in Star Trek do not need an infinite scroll feed. They need durable URLs, internal links, indexes, tables, images, and obsessive editorial maintenance.
The site’s own history page is unusually candid. It reconstructs early layouts, documents redesigns, and even complains about old Microsoft FrontPage formatting that Schneider spent years removing. By 2025 he noted that all EAS articles had finally been cleaned of the worst legacy FrontPage code.
That is the kind of statement only a decades-old webmaster gets to make.
The archive is also still active. In 2026, EAS continues adding reviews and updating technical reference pages. This is not a frozen museum piece pretending to be current. It is an old site that kept growing without abandoning its original identity.
For modern webmasters, that may be the most interesting lesson. Longevity does not require constant redesign. It requires structure, ownership, maintenance, and content worth maintaining.
CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list includes many old fan sites, but few demonstrate this much continuity between the 1998 Web and the 2026 Web.