The Most Enduring URL on the Web

by brad 5. November 2007 14:21

Ever notice how long Adobe's famous "readstep2.html" has been around?  Or ever wonder if there is a "readstep1.html"?

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html has been around for as long as I can remember.  In the early web days, we were converting lots of old Word docs into PDFs (as pretty much everyone was) and then including a link to download Adobe Reader (also as pretty much everyone else was).  Well, way back then, the URL for downloading Adobe Reader was the same as it is today ... the famous "readstep2.html".  Is there any other product that has had the same download URL for over 7 years?

The Internet Archive has versions of this page dating from all the way back to 2000.  In internet time, 2000 was forever ago.  To give you some perspective, the Archive only goes back to 2001 for Wikipedia.

And as far as "readstep1.html", there was for a time a first step:  It looks like this page was originally intended to be the first step, but I can only assume that after a while, people started linking to the now-famous second step, which had all the goodies.  Today, "readstep.html" just redirects politely to "readstep2.html"
 

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About Brad

Brad Tutterow lives in Illinois and works in Missouri. He has 12 years of experience developing web sites and Windows applications using a variety of technologies and is most excited currently about Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Halo Reach, and Visual Studio 2010.