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Source. The artifact is windows95.com, Wayback capture 20 December 1996, pulled with the unrewritten-bytes form. It was re-fetched on 24 August 2026 and diffed against the copy in reference/4-construction/image-map/: identical, 5,466 bytes. The <MAP> block on the plate is that file's, line for line, including the two spaces after <IMG and all thirteen COORDS with their disagreements intact. The tops of the first row read 23, 24, 23 and 22, and none of it is tidied. Every geometric claim was computed off those coordinates rather than eyeballed: eight overlapping pairs, the largest a 2 by 75 strip where /about.html takes 150 pixels from /bio.html, and 22,088 of the picture's 115,056 pixels falling through to <AREA SHAPE=default>. The one-pixel column at x=107 and the 103 by 1 row at y=99 are in the file, not in the plate. The sprite coda is 2bit.neocities.org/css/main.css, fetched live on 24 August 2026 and identical to the reference copy at 3,066 bytes, with the css.spritegen.com credit its author left in.

The server-side half was found, and it is an error message. The raw map file is gone: the archive's index returns zero records for windows95.com/gifs/homemap.map, so that resource was never captured. The CGI endpoint the anchor actually points at was. Forty-seven distinct /cgi-bin/imagemap/*.map URLs from this site are indexed and forty-five returned HTTP 200; one from 1996 and one from 1998 were fetched and are byte-identical at 156 bytes: Mapping Server Error. This server encountered an error: Wrong number of arguments, client may not support ISMAP. The crawler followed the link, sent no coordinates, and the server had nothing to decide, because a crawler is a client that does not support ISMAP. The two remaining records are later redirects, one to winfiles.com in 1999 and one to a parking page in 2012, and neither is a map decision. So the plate's ending is quoted from the archive and not simulated, and the earlier note in reference/ that the crawler never fetched the file is corrected here: it fetched it forty-seven times and got the same error every time.

What ships, and what is a recreation. homemap.gif and sky_tile.gif are the real 1996 files, re-fetched on 24 August 2026, checksummed against the reference copies and served from this origin at their true sizes: 11,102 bytes at 423 by 272, and 27,213 bytes at 250 by 181. Neither is scaled, because a coordinate is an image pixel and scaling would silently break all thirteen links. Both are marked ©1996 Windows95.com with no license stated, and this guide claims no license over either; they are here as documentary evidence and nothing more. The page around them is a recreation: the cloud tile, the centered Arial and the default link colors are read off the capture, and the navy is #000084, sampled out of the GIF's own color table rather than borrowed from the Windows palette. The red and green region outlines are this plate's instruments and have no period source. The #$ header the export button writes is shaped after Map THIS!'s and says so in its own second line; it is not that tool's output.

Deliberately absent. The contents of the NCSA .map file. It existed, because the anchor points at it, and it is not recoverable, so the plate shows the anchor and the error and invents nothing in between. Also absent: polygon and circle regions, because every region in this file is RECT; any claim about how common image maps were, when the technique ended, or what share of sites carried one; and any modem timing. The byte comparison on the ending card is measured, 11,102 bytes for thirteen destinations against 1,964 bytes across the five separate button GIFs lower on the same page, but the plate puts no number on what a round trip cost in 1996, because nothing in reference/ says.

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