I used what was probably the first 1MB page on the internet to discover why realloc() was not a smart choice for progressive parsing of content. I showed the problem to the lead dev and he cut the load time by a factor of ten in as many hours. NCSA had a web page where you could list your web server and a couple of sentences about it. Which was great until Netscape came out and everyone was setting up web servers.

This was back when Lycos was news to most people and Alta Vista was just launching. It was a poor man’s Yahoo. I don’t think it was a coincidence that the end of its usefulness came so close to the birth of better alternatives. The ungainliness of the status quo is usually what goads someone into trying something new.