Greg A. Woods’s homepage is what a technical personal website looks like when nobody periodically arrives with a branding deck and orders the interesting parts removed.
Visit Greg A. Woods’s homepage
Woods describes himself through a long history of systems programming, UNIX work, consulting, and involvement with technical communities including USENIX and UNIX Unanimous. The page does not compress that history into a neat biography. Instead, it branches outward into years of software, arguments, reference tables, hardware notes, and strong opinions about how computers should behave.
There are pages about C programming, Git, Multics, Rdist, Smalltalk and Squeak, serial connectors, subnetting, old computers, public-key cryptography, spam, software distribution, and assorted utilities.
There are also pages with titles that do not pretend neutrality.
“SuDo is BAD.”
“SPF is BAD.”
Elsewhere Woods argues about tabs, dynamic linking, programming practices, and systems administration with the confidence of somebody who has already had the same argument on several mailing lists and is now giving the Web a permanent copy.
That is part of the site’s historical value.
Technical culture used to leave fingerprints
Modern technical documentation tends to split into official manuals, issue trackers, Stack Overflow answers, social posts, repositories, and ephemeral chat rooms. Personal context gets separated from technical content.
Older homepages often mixed all of it.
Woods’s old-computer material, for example, lists systems he owned or worked with, including PDP-11 hardware and AT&T 3B2 machines. Some entries acknowledge a less romantic side of collecting: equipment deteriorated, storage situations changed, and not everything survived.
The software pages similarly preserve more than code. They preserve a working programmer’s priorities. Which problems annoyed him enough to document? Which tools deserved maintenance? Which industry conventions deserved an essay explaining why they were wrong?
Even the page furniture matters.
The site rejects browser-specific design, quotes Tim Berners-Lee on universal access, carries old-style construction graphics and personal badges, and remains intentionally independent of the visual conventions that replaced the homepage era. The current page has continued to receive updates rather than being sealed as a museum reconstruction.
That continuity makes the site especially useful. The ancient and current layers occupy the same namespace.
A reader can move from old UNIX culture into newer Git notes without crossing a corporate migration boundary or discovering that the first fifteen years were deleted during a redesign.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because technical history is not only preserved in standards documents and source trees. It survives in the stubborn personal pages where practitioners explained what they thought the standards documents got wrong.
Those arguments are part of the record too.