Ben “Bandit LOAF” Lesnick pinged me on Twitter a little while back:

@wtf_dragon Was this you? pic.twitter.com/0Zyui9duv9

— Ben Lesnick (@banditloaf) July 28, 2015

After a bit of discussion, he supplied me with the source of the image, which is embedded above. As you can see, it’s an old Geocities-hosted website bearing the label The Codex of Ultima Wisdom. So, it would see that particular play on words predated the wiki by a few years, at least.

The source of the image is here, at a Tumblr blog called One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op. In essence, what it does is produce images of Geocities websites taken from the Geocities data dump captured by the Archive Team. The script behind the site works from oldest to newest, so we’re basically seeing each site’s front page in the order in which those sites were abandoned.

There are probably dozens of other Ultima websites in the blog’s archive, but as that runs to over 6,000 pages, I certainly don’t have time to dive in and find them all. I am following the blog now via Feedly, so any new Ultima-related images will hopefully not escape my notice.

In the meantime, I have a question: who ran this site, and what was its purpose?

The First Age of Update: Infinitron Dragon, after a bit of sleuthing in the Internet Archive, has discovered that it was Virtues Dragon who owned this page. Morever, this page is just the Atlas section of the site, rather than being its main page.