Parent Directory - usage_199507.html 04-Aug-1995 06:29 14K usage_199506.html 03-Jul-1995 06:29 15K usage_199505.html 02-Jun-1995 06:29 13K usage_199504.html 02-May-1995 06:29 11K usage_199503.html 03-Apr-1995 06:29 9K
Apache/1.3.6 Server at ftp.nasa.gov Port 80
Nothing is stopping you. That was the whole arrangement: a directory on somebody's own server, no login, guessable by hand. Open a month.
Summary Period: July 1995
Generated 04-Aug-1995 06:29 EDT
[Daily Statistics] [Hourly Statistics] [URLs] [Sites] [Response Codes]
| Monthly Statistics for July 1995 | |
|---|---|
| Total Hits | 0 |
| Total Files | 0 |
| Total Pages | 0 |
| Total Sites | 0 |
| Total KBytes | 0 |
Ready
Drag the slider. These are real requests to a real machine, in the order they arrived on 1 July 1995.
| Hour | Hits | |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | 3000 | |
| 01 | 0 | |
| 02 | 0 | |
| 03 | 0 | |
| 04 | 0 | |
| 05 | 0 | |
| 06 | 0 | |
| 07 | 0 | |
| 08 | 0 | |
| 09 | 0 | |
| 10 | 0 | |
| 11 | 0 | |
| 12 | 0 | |
| 13 | 0 | |
| 14 | 0 | |
| 15 | 0 | |
| 16 | 0 | |
| 17 | 0 | |
| 18 | 0 | |
| 19 | 0 | |
| 20 | 0 | |
| 21 | 0 | |
| 22 | 0 | |
| 23 | 0 |
Webalizer drew this as an indexed PNG of flat bars. Analog drew
its charts as 64 by 6 pixel GIFs stretched with a WIDTH attribute:
a whole charting engine made of six tiny images and an integer.
| # | Hits | URL |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 186 | /images/NASA-logosmall.gif |
| 2 | 170 | /images/KSC-logosmall.gif |
| 3 | 141 | /shuttle/countdown/ |
| 4 | 139 | /shuttle/countdown/count.gif |
| 5 | 93 | /shuttle/missions/sts-71/sts-71-patch-small.gif |
| 6 | 82 | /shuttle/missions/sts-71/images/images.html |
| 7 | 75 | /images/launch-logo.gif |
| 8 | 71 | /images/WORLD-logosmall.gif |
| 9 | 69 | /images/MOSAIC-logosmall.gif |
| 10 | 69 | /shuttle/missions/sts-71/mission-sts-71.html |
Look at what is first. The most requested URL on the site is
/images/NASA-logosmall.gif, at 186 hits. It is the logo,
and it is on every page.
That is where every inflated traffic claim of the decade came from. This excerpt is 3,000 hits, 2,665 files and 912 pages from 321 sites. Hits counted a page and its images separately. Everybody quoted hits.
| # | Hits | Hostname |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 58 | teleman.pr.mcs.net |
| 2 | 42 | 129.188.154.200 |
| 3 | 40 | www-a1.proxy.aol.com |
| 4 | 40 | palona1.cns.hp.com |
| 5 | 36 | svasu.extern.ucsd.edu |
| 6 | 35 | kristina.az.com |
| 7 | 34 | slip-5.io.com |
| 8 | 33 | dnet018.sat.texas.net |
| 9 | 32 | brandt.xensei.com |
| 10 | 32 | news.ti.com |
Those are resolved hostnames, not addresses. Of the 321 sites in this excerpt, 274 resolved to a name and only 47 stayed a bare address. The server looked up who you were and wrote it down, and then somebody published the file.
And that is all it knew. No cookie, no identifier, no third party. It could not follow you anywhere because there was nobody to follow you with. The Common Log Format this file is in has no referrer, no user agent and no search terms, which is why this page does not show any.
| 200 | 2665 |
| 304 | 157 |
| 302 | 156 |
| 404 | 22 |
Generated by The Webalizer Ver. 2.23-08
One. The Webalizer report this page is drawn from was captured off a live server in 2026, at a guessable path, indexed by search engines. Somebody's traffic is public right now and almost certainly nobody chose that on purpose any more.
Two. In the generated HTML of that report, visible only in view source, sitting in machine output on a random VPS in 2026:
<!-- Give the power back to the programmers --> <!-- Support the Free Software Foundation --> <!-- (http://www.fsf.org) -->
Three. Analog's own homepage now serves something Windows Defender refuses to open. The program is still on GitHub under GPL v2 and still runs. The software survived; the site rotted.
BORDER=2 CELLSPACING=1 CELLPADDING=1,
first column pinned at 380. Sized for a 640px screen and never rewritten.FONT SIZE="-1". Relative type only, no
pixels anywhere, CENTER doing the layout. Machine-generated HTML 4.0
that nobody ever hand-edited.SMALL, above
a rule. Square brackets as the universal sign of a jump link.31-Jul-2026 06:29 CEST. Day-month-year and the server's own
timezone, because cron generated it on a machine that had one.You knew exactly what your site did, from your own server's own record, and so did anybody who cared to look. The hit counter is this same argument at one-number scale.
What they gave up was not accuracy. The old measurement was worse: it could not tell a reader from a logo. What they gave up is that the record lived on their own machine and anyone could read it. All three programs still work. Nobody publishes the output any more. The tooling did not fail, the willingness did, and what replaced it moved the record onto somebody else's server and charged for the view.