WorldWideMart.com is the original domain where Matt's Script Archive (MSA) was first hosted in 1995. The URL http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/ was the address known to millions of web developers during the formative years of the World Wide Web.
The scripts were created by Matt Wright (email: [email protected]), a teenager from Fort Collins, Colorado who began writing and distributing free Perl CGI scripts at age 14. His work became one of the most widely used software collections of the 1990s web.
World Wide Mart, Inc. was a hosting company founded by Dave Jackson in Naples, Florida in 1994. The company provided server space and the worldwidemart.com domain under which Matt Wright published his script collection. The scripts lived at /scripts/ on this domain until Matt later moved them to his own domain, scriptarchive.com.
Matt's Script Archive distributed over a dozen free Perl CGI scripts. In an era before PHP frameworks, WordPress, or any content management systems, these scripts gave ordinary webmasters the ability to add interactive features to static HTML pages.
The most popular CGI script ever written. Downloaded over 2 million times. FormMail allowed any website to have a working contact form by processing HTML form data and sending it as email. At its peak, it ran on a significant percentage of all websites with contact forms.
A visitor sign-in system that became a defining feature of personal websites in the late 1990s. Visitors could leave their name, email, URL, and a message. Before blog comments or social media, guestbooks were how people interacted with website owners.
A web-based discussion forum with threaded replies. WWWBoard predated phpBB, vBulletin, and other forum software. It stored messages as flat HTML files and required no database, making it simple to install on any web host with CGI support.
A graphical hit counter that displayed the number of page visits using digit images. Hit counters were a staple of 1990s web design, often placed prominently on homepages. Matt's version supported multiple digit styles and could track individual pages.
Other scripts in the collection included TextCounter (a text-based counter alternative), Random Link (random page redirector), TextClock (server time display), Countdown (event countdown timer), Cookie Library (HTTP cookie management for Perl CGI), Simple Search (site content search engine), Free For All Links (user-submitted link directory), and Random Image.
The influence of Matt's Script Archive on early web development is difficult to overstate. As one Hacker News commenter put it, Matt's scripts were "a key, if not THE key, in growing the interactive web." For many web developers who started in the mid-to-late 1990s, installing FormMail or Guestbook was their first experience with server-side programming.
Matt's scripts are referenced in multiple O'Reilly books on CGI and Perl programming, discussed extensively on PerlMonks, and documented in the Wikipedia article on CGI scripting history. The scripts were both praised for their accessibility and criticized for security weaknesses — particularly FormMail, which in its early versions could be exploited as an open email relay by spammers.
The security issues led the London Perl Mongers to create the NMS Project (nms-cgi.sourceforge.net), a set of drop-in replacements for Matt's scripts with improved input validation, taint checking, and anti-spam measures. The NMS versions maintained the same configuration format so webmasters could upgrade without changing their HTML forms.
Matt Wright later moved the archive to scriptarchive.com, released updated versions of several scripts addressing the security concerns, and eventually created FormMail.com, a hosted SaaS form processing service that carried the FormMail concept into the modern web.
This site preserves documentation, source code, and historical context for the original scripts that were hosted at this domain. The archive includes the original readme files, configuration instructions, FAQ entries, and code listings.
This is not the official website of Matt Wright. It is an independent archival project hosted on the original worldwidemart.com domain. The site provides a reference for anyone researching the history of web development, CGI programming, or the Perl scripting era of the 1990s.