The first entry in the "What's new?"-list dates from 19.12.1996, but my web page is a lot older than this entry. Sometime in 1995, I applied for a user account for the unix system of the university of Heidelberg (I had an user account earlier, for a lecture on numeric mathematics/Fortran90, but lost it after the lecture). Like many others, I discovered how to connect to the internet: lot of fun, a sign on the wall in the users room indicated that it was allowed to use the internet connection only for the purpose of scientific researches. I wonder how many scientific researches involve the internet: the user room was always crowded, usually you had to wait for a seat. Soon, I had my first own page running. The first project I planned was a collection of the worst quotes of Hegel, the Hegel florilegium, something I never actually did. One of the earliest features of my page I established was the girl asking the visitor wether she should undress.
Days of discoveries: I remember I discovered a stunning page about surrealism, linked with another stunning page about dadaism, with games like "Find the Spam". I soon found out that I like excite more than other search engines, and that some search words led to better results than other: it was easy to find tons of information about fractals, but hard to find some pages about real mathematics. And some day, I typed in the words "chastity belt". To my surprise, it didn't lead me to a page about medivian knights and crusades, but to the page of a vendor of contemporarian chastity belts ("Jamin'", they had and still have a simple leather device, without the possibility to pee within, not that comfortable for 24/7 use). Unfortunatly, neither Bill Jones nor Tollyboy had web pages of their own at that time. I therefor decided to publish a mixed list with internet and ordinary snail mail addresses of chastity belt manufactors. Since I received some questions from visitors of my web page regarding chastity belts that required some answers, I also published a kind of FAQ about contemporarian chastity belts. From now on, I had a Chastity Belt Page, and the hit counter started to grow.
Since my life doesn't revolve entirely around the subject of chastity belts, I added a lot of non-chastity-belt-pages about all kinds of subjects, but it seems as if the pages about chastity belts are by far the most popular pages.
The university of Heidelberg had a top-200 page, listing the 200 most popular private home pages of users of the universitarian computation pool. Soon, the first few places in this list had been conquered by my web pages. And although they had obviously adult content, I never received any complaints or threats of deleting my page, or any other trouble (while AOL deletes pages as soon as they contain words like "breast", even if they are pages about breast cancer).
Since those days, I changed to a faster server (still slow, I know, but not as slow as the university server), added reports about chastity belts, fictional stories, some pictures, a comic, a quiz, a screen saver, a desktop theme and an essay to my chastity belt page, and the list of vendors now contain three dozen entries. Also, a lot of other pages about chastity belts appeared, a kind of online community evolved. I guess this is also the reason why a lot of new manufactors like Access Denied, Neosteel, cb-2000 or Reinholds (to name just a few) appeared: those manufactors are able to sell their products via the internet and to find persons interested in chastity belts all over the world. I think this is an aspect of e-commerce often forgotten: the internet is not only a tool to sell something that was sold before, it can create a completly new market, since it turns a very exotic need (and the need for chastity belts seems to be an exotic need) into something that can be commercially interesting. Bill Jones and Tollyboy existed without the internet, but it's obvious that nobody would have had the idea to found all those new manufactors without the possibility to connect to exotic needs via internet. Also, the internet and its exchange and discussion allowed to improve the art of making chastity belts dramatically. Before, one would be glad to find a maker of chastity belts at all (and maybe would pay any price for a belt of uncertain quality). With the help of the internet, it is now possible to compare different companies trying to satisfy an exotic need, and to get some feedback from other consumers and their experiences. Also, the exchange via internet allowed the manufactors to compare and to combine their ideas of production: good ideas can be adapted and improved. Therefor, I would assume that the quality of chastity belts improved dramatically within the last five years.
16.3.2000 Jan Thor