ICYouSee belongs to the generation of websites that existed before most people had decided what a website was supposed to look like. The site, created and maintained by John R. Henderson, went online in December 1994. One of its most durable projects used the Titanic passenger list as something the Web could organize, compare and explore.
Source: ICYouSee
The Titanic material first appeared in 1998 and broke passenger information into demographic tables: nationality, travel class, survival, deaths and lifeboat occupancy. Instead of treating the disaster only as a narrative, the site made the passenger list legible as data.
That sounds ordinary now. In 1998, it was a much more interesting use of a browser.
Before the Titanic Dataset Became a Machine-Learning Cliché
Today, a version of Titanic passenger data is famous because it became a standard beginner dataset for statistics and machine learning. Students routinely predict survival with decision trees or logistic regression before they know much about the historical source.
ICYouSee represents an earlier stage of that transformation. The purpose was not a Kaggle exercise. The tables were meant to help readers inspect the people aboard the ship and compare who survived.
Later statistical literature discussing the many versions of the Titanic dataset specifically points back to Henderson’s ICYouSee page and dates the site’s launch to 1994 and the Titanic page to June 1998.
HTML 3.2, Background Images and a Cat GIF
Surviving descriptions of the site also preserve its technical character: HTML 3.2-era markup, a background image, old font and align attributes, a small cat graphic and a navigation structure built before responsive design became an expectation.
That is not merely visual nostalgia. It tells us what a serious educational site looked like when the Web’s conventions were still unsettled.
ICYouSee mixed historical material, personal pages, finding tools and educational resources under one independent domain. Its Titanic work is especially valuable because it sits at the intersection of Internet history and data history: a historical passenger list becoming a browsable dataset years before “data science” became a mainstream label.
The live site is now unreliable, which makes the surviving references to its structure and publication dates more important, not less.
Original site: http://icyousee.org/