The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.

HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.

In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)

The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.

In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.

I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.

A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.

To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?

rodneylives