I spoke to Quinn Snell's CS426 class yesterday. One of the things I talked about was how the World Wide Web got introduced to BYU. I had just joined the faculty in 1993 from the University of Idaho and was waiting for my equipment to arrive. To combat my boredom, I started playing with these new things called web servers. We set one up at http://lal.cs.byu.edu. We even set up a web site for the University (without any explicit permission) and we'd teaching professors and grad students from all over campus about HTML, browsers, and web servers. One of the most popular things we did was called the LAL Cat Archive.

Because all the machines in my lab were named after cats (like panther, jaguar, etc.) one of my grad students, Kelly Hall, started to collect pictures of cats from various places. For a time, this collection was the most popular content at BYU and even got a mention in Newsweek magazine. Eventually, we had to take it down because of the bandwidth drain, but the pictures have been preserved at a few mirror sites.