It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->

This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz...

Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record.

This bit made me grin:

N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want

(Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)

That link automatically downloads a CDR file.