Thanks to the ETH Zürich, a list of places where to tango was created and put on the net. Some places created own web pages. They played an important role in the process of diffusion of the tango. The world's first Tango Server was created an maintained by Shawn Buchberger at EPFL Lausanne. However, Changes of the web policy of the EPFL Lausanne, they were obliged to stop that pioneer act, to avoid missuse of resources.
Since Ernst Buchberger
had to stop it's service, it gave room for further tries, so
Ernesto's Tango Links in Vienna and Garrit Fleischmann's
Tango Geography
(Cybertango, Frankfurt) filled up the gap.
The
available search engines at that time needed to be informed about new sites,
and sometimes it took days to appear. Search engines, like
Altavista were reachable in Europe only early in the morning before
the US demand brought the available transfer capacities to their limit.
Not all sites were
listed, and topic related link lists were very popular. Page maintainers
informed the list maintainers and things worked.
Today, about 20 years later, it is hard to protect a web site from being found
by the search engines and one may ask why a links list is still needed.
Indeed, the large number of sites raising and vanishing makes it impossible
to maintain a links list up to date by hand. The competing search engine will
always win. However, for historical reasons, you will still find this
list here: forgive me the many dead and outdated links.