Clint Sprott’s web server looks like a physics department accidentally left a laboratory door open onto the Internet.
Sprott is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose work spans experimental plasma physics and nonlinear dynamics. His site takes those subjects and mixes them with software, fractal art, technical notes, photographs, MIDI files, amateur radio, books, seminars and whatever else belonged on his server.
The center of gravity is chaos.
Sprott’s 1993 book Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos described methods for automatically searching mathematical systems for chaotic solutions and turning them into images. The accompanying software could generate large numbers of patterns, and the website grew into a public gallery of the results.
One page still produces a new “Fractal of the Day” automatically. The archive includes Lorenz attractors, Julia sets, Mandelbrot images, symmetric icons, animated GIFs, three-dimensional attractors and natural fractals found in bark, ice, moss, broccoli and pavement.
The software shelf is still there
The software section is pure archaeology.
There are DOS executables for chaos demonstrations, strange-attractor searches, Julia sets, neural-network attractors and IFS fractals. Some use VESA graphics modes such as 800×600 or 1024×768. The page still explains how to download files with Netscape by holding Shift while clicking.
It also notes that many of the old programs can still be run under DOSBox.
That is the kind of continuity old technical sites provide unusually well. A paper explains the mathematics. A ZIP file contains the program. A gallery shows the output. Another page preserves the source code. The pieces remain connected because one person kept them connected.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many academic and technical personal sites like this, where the web page is less a publication than an exposed working directory of someone’s intellectual life.
Sprott’s Gateway is still useful because it never reduced itself to a résumé.
It kept the experiments.