Lou Montulli wrote a wonderful background story about the origins of the blink tag, one of the numerous great things that he has developed (including the predecessor to lynx).

Many who experienced the early web in its full glory have bad memories of table-less web sites that made heavy use of blink tags, under construction animated gifs, and cloudy, repeat-backgrounds made in photoshop. I treasure these bad memories. Any memorable era will have its own special gaudiness, perhaps because there are few physical and social rules in place to prevent silliness.

But how else would we get unbridled greatness?

Long live the blink tag!