The original features page is dated December 7, 2005. The footer reads: “TextDrive™ is a trademark of Joyent Inc.” The merger with Joyent had closed the previous month. The feature list had not changed.

What the list said, in 2005, for $12 a month: Apache and Lighttpd side by side. PHP4 and PHP5 side by side. Ruby, Perl, Python, Clearsilver. Five version control systems. Four database engines. Full shell access. “As many Subversion repositories as you might need.”

That last phrase is the key. Not “up to five” or “additional repositories available on request.” As many as you might need. TextDrive was run by people who had decided to trust their customers, and the feature list is what trust looks like when it’s itemized.

The version control section lists Subversion, SVK, Darcs, Monotone and Arch. Git is not there. Git 1.0 shipped on December 21, 2005 — fourteen days after this page was archived. Junio C Hamano, who released it, noted that the name “1.0.0” ought to mean a significant milestone, but actually it did not: the kernel folks had been running it in production for some time already. Nobody knew what had already arrived.

The CMS list opens with Textpattern. Wordpress is second. The list was not alphabetical. Dean wrote it.

Under Email: “Furious spam/content/attachment filtering.” Every other item on the page is written in the flat register of technical documentation. One word breaks it. Dean noticed “Mod_speling” — a real Apache module, misspelled by Apache, not by him — and added [sic]. These were not accidents. He was a typographer working in a medium that rewarded carelessness. He cared anyway.

The features page was a commercial document. It is now a record of what it meant, in 2005, to take web publishing seriously. “As many as you might need” is a better description of that than anything else on the page.