Back in 1995, when digital cameras hadn’t become a thing and just 14% of Americans had ever been online, Gary Matoso came up with the radical and slightly insane idea to create a real-time Web travelogue across Russia.
I couldn’t figure out how he thought he could accomplish this, given the sorry state of Russian phone lines and the difficulty — even in the best of circumstances — of uploading photos to the brand new World Wide Web. But Gary was convinced he could pull it off. And with the help of Tripp Mikich and Chuck Gathard, his San Francisco-based partners in the project, he did. Gary and I traveled across Russia for three months, posting updates every few days to a site we dubbed The Russian Chronicles.
Here’s a link to the original Russian Chronicles website — best viewed, as the homepage still states, “in Netscape 1.1 or higher.”
