Yanoff list

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The Yanoff List was a publicly available list of practical or just interesting things on the Internet compiled by Scott Yanoff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee . Before and in the early days of the WorldWideWeb, it represented a way of navigating the Internet and finding entry points.

The list contained, in text form, constantly updated, made generally accessible, for example via FTP and fingers , a selection of known and new applications of the Internet, FTP servers, telnet services, Gopher addresses and much more. Among the addresses were the catalogs of the major libraries as well as academic and Internet-connected coffee machines .

As a web directory , it was an entry point, manually created, by no means complete, but still representative in times of a smaller Internet that was initially focused on government and academic users with mostly a technical background. The scope of the list is comparatively marginal today, at that time it was an essential and much appreciated help due to the lack of other sources, the lack of current knowledge and the lack of comprehensive search engines. The list was known and popular, was practical and was used. WAIS information services, Veronica and Archie servers represent other starting points for Internet search, which offers from telnet, finger, gopher and ftp are accessed via directories and search engines and are mentioned in the Yanoff list.

In contrast to later hierarchically divided directory services (only) accessible via the WorldWideWeb, the Yanoff list consists of a single sequential text document, structured according to subjective and objective aspects, according to topics and alphabetically, which at the time was accessible via a variety of access methods on the Internet.

Scott Yanoff still works in the IT industry to this day. The Yanoff list, as it was in 1990 ff., Can be seen today from a technical and historical perspective and is interesting in this context. A newsreader for the Palm is named after Scott Yanoff or his popular list.

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