Doug's LCARS Webpage

GeoCities · Netscape Communicator · ~1998 · the first website — still lost

Every museum needs a first waypoint. This is mine.

Before superterran.com, before the Tripod Windows XP site, before the first line of Visual Basic, there was a single GeoCities page I built by hand in Netscape Communicator around 1998 — a Star Trek, LCARS-styled personal site, packed with the gifs and animations a kid collects when he first discovers that he can make the web instead of just reading it. I called it “Doug’s LCARS Webpage.”

I have not found it yet. This page is here anyway — because the first thing you ever made is worth a marker even when the thing itself is gone.

What this is not

It would be easy to point at the USS Endeavour — a GeoCities LCARS Star Trek site from the same era that the archaeology did turn up — and call it solved. It isn’t. The Endeavour was a play-by-email sim I crewed, run by someone else. It’s a real and lovely waypoint, but it’s a place I joined, not a thing I built. “Doug’s LCARS Webpage” was mine, and it’s still out there or still lost — separate either way.

The search so far

The honest tally, kept in full with the archive:

Not in any backup — it predates everything I kept, including the superterran alias itself.
Not under the handles I can remember (superterran, vlink22285) on GeoCities, Tripod, or AOL Hometown.
Swept the Star-Trek and technology GeoCities neighborhoods — Area51, TelevisionCity, CapeCanaveral, ResearchTriangle, SoHo, Tokyo, SiliconValley — for any page that is both Doug and LCARS. Plenty of other people’s LCARS pages; plenty of Douglases; no me.

So the trail is open, not cold. The things most likely to crack it: the exact old GeoCities address, a forgotten early screen name, or the Star Trek WebRing it belonged to — find the ring, and the ring names the page.

Why it leads the collection

A museum of someone’s work should be honest about where the work starts — and sometimes the starting point is a door you can’t open yet. Doug’s LCARS Webpage is that door: the 1998 origin of every redesign, every skin, every LCARS panel and half-finished CMS that follows. Found or not, the museum begins here.

If you’re reading this and you remember a late-90s GeoCities Star Trek page called “Doug’s LCARS Webpage” — or you have an old link to it — that’s the missing piece.