Matt's Script Archive (1995)
43 comments
·March 2, 2025mattwright
wolrah
Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.
I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.
ttepasse
In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.
Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.
But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.
(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)
mattwright
That's interesting, thanks for sharing!
rahimnathwani
I'm amazed that you created an HN account in 2014 but that this is your first comment. How did you resist the temptation to comment for so many years?
mattwright
I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.
You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.
kragen
I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.
McGlockenshire
Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.
sejje
I asked dang once and he said like 1% of visitors comment.
rahimnathwani
I had assumed that the majority of accounts are created when the owner first wants to write a comment (or post a submission).
I wonder whether dang meant 1% of registered visitors, or 1% of visitors.
mattgreenrocks
Thank you for this site. It helped me learn Perl and use it to make some cool CGI scripts.
jqcoffey
Hey, thanks Matt for providing a well lit path to getting things done on the Internet before anyone knew what they were doing.
xivzgrev
Wow what a small world! When I was learning Perl in the early 2000s, I learned in part by copying and tweaking your scripts.
Thanks for sharing these into the world. I found them a huge help.
mjd
Thanks for creating this resource that helped so many people build programs for the web so long ago.
throwaway422432
Thanks Matt!
I ran a forum (30k+ monthly users) last century using the WWWboard.
ekanes
Gosh. Seeing that is kind of more ... emotional than I'd have expected. Gonna print a screenshot of it for the memories folder. It was just such a different time. Can't imagine what later generations would think was the point of things like a web counter, but golly that was so cool back in the day. :)
"Display a text count of visitors to your web pages. Includes: zero padding, file locking, linking the count, displaying begin date and counting multiple pages."
susam
Exactly! These old websites from the 90s that are still alive carry such a powerful dose of nostalgia. I wrote and published my first public website on GeoCities. Sadly, that's lose to time. The second one I wrote was published on 20m.com which offered 20 MB of free hosting space and a custom subdomain. That was more than 20 years ago. Incredibly 20m.com and that silly website of mine are still online: <http://encoders.20m.com/>!
If you scroll down, you'll find the obligatory visitor count on the sidebar. That's still running too! You can't see in the published HTML but that visitor counter is generated by an ISML tag.
<isml type="counter">
dang
Related. Others?
Matt's Script Archive, Inc.: Free Perl CGI Scripts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33305258 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)
Matt's Script Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789342 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Matt's Script Archive. Offering free CGI scripts to the web community since 1995 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391802 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
cutler
Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.
89vision
What a throwback! I discovered these as a kid in the early days of the web. I remember the perl being a little too obtuse to grok as a preteen, but I figured out where I could change things at certain parts of the code to make things look a little differently. Those were magical years that inspired me to get into coding and problem solving as an adult. Thanks Matt.
bergie
Oh wow. That brings back memories. I think every site I built back then at least used that FormMail script.
Then we started transitioning to Lisp, and somehow ended up with PHP.
In any case, I don't think I'd be here without your help, Matt. Big, big thanks!
kev009
Programmatically generating web content felt so rad in the 1990s. It's funny to me now because with deeper historical knowledge it's not a lot different than what many block-mode green screen systems were doing for a long time before that. Of course it grew up into something more, but the early web was not much different than that with fonts and image embeds and relying on the underlying transport and naming system to make it easy to span.
xnx
Wow. Amazing that this page exists virtually unchanged from 30 years ago.
We've definitely lost some part of the charm of the early web when it was common to get email, web space, FTP, and even shell access from your ISP.
mattl
https://sdf.org if you want some of that back
kirse
Another legendary throwback from that era:
notadev
WWWBoard is such a nostalgia hit. My local music venue's forum was where my early internet persona originated. Sometimes I nostalgic and use Wayback machine to see what all my fellow teenagers were talking about 25 years ago.
mattwright
Fun fact: WWWBoard had a brief cameo in the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" -- their official community site used the script for many years after most had moved on.
krapp
You can still find some of these boards online. It's like seeing a thylacene crossing the street.
waveforms
wow, thanks Matt. You and Lincoln Stein (Bioperl founder if I remember correctly) got me started with my first website.
McGlockenshire
Like many, I got my start with perl by finding myself having to customize a WWWBoard. The site owner then switched to a new perl based forum that used flat linear threads, the Ultimate Bulletin Board. (Which itself is based on code in Selena Sol's "Instant CGI/Perl"!) So, I learned that too. The guy that made it had a forum for it where other people were sharing their changes to the code, mind you this was a commercial product. The company ended up hiring a handful of us from that forum. I ended up doing the coding on the perl UBB for five years, launching my career.
So, thanks Matt. Your code may not have aged well, but it touched millions and millions of people.
30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.