Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet.

Essentially, here’s the deal. Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters. One in particular, WWWBoard, became a massive hit, becoming one of the first widely used web forum apps on the internet.

The copyright notice for WWWBoard, Wright’s widely used forum-hosting software.

The site Wright built, Matt’s Script Archive , unwittingly helped to highlight the divergence between how normal people think about software, and the developer’s perspective.

Wright, and others like him, hit upon an obvious need.…