I spent an hour looking for this in Usenet/listserv archives and finally gave up. Anyone know the original URL for “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” before they renamed it to “Yahoo” and moved to akebono․stanford․edu/yahoo in mid-1994? https://twitter.com/jomc/status/1381271184562589709

Originally launched as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” Jerry Yang renamed it to “Jerry and David’s Guide” because he hated getting all the credit—but David Filo hated getting top billing, so they quickly decided on renaming it “Yahoo.”

I’m pretty sure that before they decided on the “yahoo” name, it was located in another directory on the akebono server, which was Jerry’s workstation, but where? Please don’t make me pick up the phone to figure this out.

Here’s what Jerry’s Guide looked like on April 7, 1994, the last day it was updated, from this short Stanford doc from 1997 about Yahoo’s history via @jomc.

Thanks to a tip from @artlung, I found this page in the IA of David Filo's backups/archives from the Stanford days. There's a ton of interesting stuff in there, from which you can piece together a rough chronology. https://web.archive.org/web/20020222085950/http://public.yahoo.com/~filo/stanford/

In March 1994, Jerry Yang's list of sites was on his homepage at http://akebono.stanford.edu/~jerry  and manually-edited, archived here from David Filo's backup. https://web.archive.org/web/20020306054244/http://public.yahoo.com/~filo/stanford/940324/

The first version of what would become Yahoo was called "Hierarchical Hotlist," a script parsing a text file of websites and generating one huge static HTML page from it. This capture, titled "Jerry Yang's Guide to Mosaic," is from April 7, 1994. https://web.archive.org/web/20020306053051/http://public.yahoo.com/~filo/stanford/940407/hotparse

And finally, here's the answer. From the May 20, 1994 backup, we find the Perl script generating "Jerry & Dave's Guide to WWW," showing that its originally pre-Yahoo URL was http://akebono.stanford.edu/~jerry/bin/index.html. Doesn't get more '90s oldweb than that. (thx @jomc and @artlung!)

If you need more proof, this wonderfully Web 1.0 webpage by @ssavitzky, last updated in November 2000, refers to "Jerry and Dave's Guide to WWW" and links to the same URL. http://thestarport.org/Browse/forSoftware/

If you'd like to see May 1994 Perl script that generated an early version of what would become the Yahoo directory, @artlung put it here. (Filo added a 'base' meta tag so links/images would work with his copy, but it otherwise looks untouched.) https://gist.github.com/artlung/74184de3c381966a14f97a8605d17572

please enjoy this retrospective of the yahoo homepage set to smash mouth's "all star" created for the yahoo 10-year-anniversary celebration DVD https://archive.org/details/Yahoo10Year

Oh, one more thing: this appears to be the complete source code for Yahoo circa 1994/1995, accidentally exposed in 1999 when someone enabled directory listings and turned off CGI execution on the Stanford server. https://web.archive.org/web/19981203133459/http://akebono.stanford.edu:80/users/jerry/bin/

This file from April 6, 1995 looks like the last version of the Perl script that parsed the hotlist and generated the Yahoo homepage, nav, etc before it moved to yahoo․com. https://web.archive.org/web/19990219134446/http://akebono.stanford.edu/users/jerry/bin/newyahoo

I bet someone could get 1995-era Yahoo up-and-running from the original source code and archived hotlist files with this.