Mike Ralls did not build a personal page by writing a résumé. He opened with Cuba, Thailand, Mount Fuji, cold-water endurance, free will, an African spider monkey named Gizmo, and a séance that supposedly summoned Dick Tracy. Then he admitted that this probably was not the clearest introduction.
Visit the preserved Mister Ralls page
That is immediately more useful than a modern profile card.
The page survives today through a GeoCities mirror, and some of its original images and counters are visibly wounded. References still point toward old geocities.com and Yahoo-era resources. Character encoding has taken a few bites out of the text. The layout is table-heavy. None of this makes the page less interesting. It makes the page more legible as an artifact of its time.
Ralls describes returning to Oregon after living in Japan, where he had worked as a teacher and what his business cards called a cultural ambassador for the Japanese government. He writes about the way living abroad forces the mind to accept that things do not have to work one familiar way in order to work at all.
At the time represented by the page, he was in graduate school pursuing an interdisciplinary master’s degree with history as the eventual goal. He had also started rock climbing, partly because ordinary gym exercise bored him. This is exactly the kind of context the old personal Web preserved casually and at scale: somebody’s interests, plans, jokes, intellectual obsessions, and current phase of life all occupying the same page.
The stated purpose of the site was mostly to post Ralls’s alternate history writing and whatever else he felt like sharing. The table of contents also linked to photographs and his Usenet presence. That last link is especially period-correct. A personal website and Usenet identity were not separate brands; they were different places where the same person existed online.
Modern social profiles encourage people to compress themselves into templates. GeoCities did almost the opposite. It gave you some server space and enough HTML rope to build whatever representation of yourself seemed reasonable that week.
This page survives because somebody mirrored it. That means we do not merely have a description of what a personal homepage looked like. We can still see the broken image references, the odd spacing, the anti-spam email trick, the grandiose heading “Mike Ralls – The Man and The Legend,” and the actual prose.
For Internet-history research, that messiness is the evidence.