This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of mises.org in 1995. Since then, mises.org has become an enormous website that publishes new articles, podcasts, and other multimedia content six times per week. Today, the website contains tens of thousands of articles, thousands of lectures, and dozens of ebooks and audiobooks, all freely accessible to the public.
Back when websites were a novelty, Mises Institute Senior Fellow Peter Klein had the idea that the Mises Institute needed a website. In this interview, Dr. Klein discusses the early days of mises.org.
The Misesian: Nowadays, it’s just assumed that every organization needs a website. But that wasn’t common in the mid-1990s. What made you decide the Institute needed a website?
Peter Klein: I was fortunate to be exposed to the World Wide Web in its infancy, sometime in early 1993. The computer lab at Berkeley, where I was in graduate school, had some Unix terminals with a broadband connection and a version of Mosaic, the first real internet browser.
The websites that existed at that time were mostly educational and nonprofit sites sharing articles and images (interaction via “bulletin boards” and email occurred in other parts of the internet). When I came to the Institute in fall 1994 as a Research Fellow, I had the idea that the Mises Institute could also have a presence in this space—but it was more of a fun experiment than a serious promotional effort.
I had taught myself some basic HTML programming, and I mocked up a demo site and showed it to Lew Rockwell, who saw the potential right away and gave the go-ahead. Originally the pages were hosted on a server at Auburn University, but as soon as it became possible to purchase domain names and contract with private servers, we snapped up “mises.org,” and the rest is history.
TM: mises.org is huge now. But how did it start? What was the first content to go up on the site?
PK: An early version of the site—not the very first but pretty close—can be viewed at archive.org.
There were a few pages with basic information about the Institute’s mission and purpose, biographies of Mises and Rothbard, and details on memberships, conferences, and publications.
The content was mostly static in those days—no daily articles! But I did have the idea that we should post new issues of our periodicals (back then The Review of Austrian Economics, The Free Market, the Mises Review, the Austrian Economics Newsletter, and the Mises Memo) as they became available. Our book catalog was also online, though there wasn’t yet a mechanism for orders or payments!
As you can see from browsing these archived pages, the aesthetic standards were somewhat different back in that day. (The yellow buttons on the home page were created circa 1996 by a professional graphic designer, but the images on the publications and other pages were created by yours truly.)
TM: When did you realize that the Institute should start featuring new articles on a regular basis?
PK: As the web evolved from static web pages into interactive and dynamic sites with regularly updated content, it became clear that we needed to feature daily articles and eventually videos, blogs, and other fresh material. Instead of publishing a monthly Free Market, we needed to produce articles on current affairs and share them on a more frequent basis, and those began appearing around 2000.
Obviously the medium has continued to evolve— mises.org has always been on the cutting edge in terms of how educational content can be distributed and shared.
TM: Paul Krugman famously declared that the internet would be no more important than the fax machine. Did you encounter any skepticism about the site early on?
PK: I’m not a big fan of most of Krugman’s pronouncements, but I actually think he gets too much criticism for this one. The truth is that nobody really knew how quickly this medium would grow and change.
Based on server statistics it became clear early on that people enjoyed reading and interacting with our site, but it took a while for the electronic versions of our articles and books to overtake their physical counterparts (and the Institute continues to publish beautiful print books and glossy magazines!).
One thing I didn’t anticipate was the shift from written to spoken communication—our videos, podcasts, and similar media are much more popular, particularly among younger visitors, than our written materials.
In the very early days, I was mostly just trying to explain to people what a website was and how to get on the internet (usually by “dialing up”). I certainly didn’t anticipate that mises.org would become what it is today. But I’m delighted that it did!
