My interest piqued by Tom’s

My interest piqued by Tom’s investigation of the history of Yahoo!, I began rooting around the Web to see what I could dig up about Yahoo!’s early days. Here’s what I came up with:

- Yahoo! started out on a server at Stanford in 1994: akebono.stanford.edu (it was actually in the /yahoo directory, but that link no longer works). When the traffic to Yahoo! started getting too much for that little server (and Stanford’s network) to handle, Yang and Filo moved the site onto Netscape’s servers.

- This is cool: a mirror of the Yahoo! directory from 1994, when the site was still on akebono (looks like it was grabbed on Dec 31, 1994). At the time, the directory had only 23,836 entries in it (most of them now broken), three of which pertain to the first HTML editor I used, HTML Assistant. I like the simple copyright at the bottom of each page: “Copyright © 1994 David Filo and Jerry Yang”.

- Some stats pertaining to Yahoo! (the random link feature actually) from Dec 1994 - Jan 1996, featuring the many browsers of a bygone era, including early versions of Netscape, Mosaic, AIR_Mosaic, IBM WebExplorer, Cello, and OmniWeb. You can find many of these browsers on the 0sil8 Old School Browsers page and at the Evolt Browser Archive.

- The Entertainment: Magazines: Entertainment and Fun listing contains a now-defunct entry for Boing Boing before it got its own domain name. Mark is old school, kids.

- A screenshot of what the top Yahoo! bar looked like, circa 1995.

- An email from 1994 recommending Yahoo! to people.

- According to this article, Yahoo! was first called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.