Hogranch is the kind of personal homepage that accidentally became more interesting by not being redesigned.
Visit John R. Pierce’s Hogranch homepage
The page says it was last modified, barely, in December 2010. What survives is a layered record of one person’s family, cameras, software career, favorite links and Internet-era interests accumulated over years.
There are family photographs, music-festival references and digital photo albums stretching back to the period when owning a digital camera was still worth identifying by model.
Pierce lists a Nikon Coolpix 950, Canon PowerShot S300, Canon S70, Canon 350D and photos taken by his children on a Canon A510.
The hardware names turn an ordinary family-photo section into a small timeline of consumer digital photography.
CP/M, Windows 95 and a pile of stale links
The computing material is even better.
Pierce links to photographs from the period when he worked at Digital Research, adding the parenthetical reminder: “Can YOU say CP/M?”
He also preserved snapshots from Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch event in Redmond, which he attended back when he thought Windows 95 was, in his words, pretty cool stuff.
Then comes a section explicitly labeled “Some of my favorite stale links.”
That heading may be the most honest navigation label on the old Web.
The list points toward Mersenne prime hunting, NASA mission pages, weather imagery, astronomy resources, experimental aircraft photos, live coastal cameras and old Internet humor. Some links survived. Some moved. Some are dead enough that the page comments on their death.
Near the bottom, Hogranch preserves part of a 1996 federal court decision striking down provisions of the Communications Decency Act. The quoted passage praises the Internet’s chaos and cacophony as part of its strength.
Placed on a page like this, the argument feels almost illustrated by the site itself.
Nothing here fits a content strategy. Family pictures sit beside CP/M memories, space links, weather maps, Windows 95, music and constitutional law.
That was the point of a homepage.
You did not need a niche. You needed somewhere on the Internet that was yours.