In a historical perspective, PAW was one of the first web directories, listing various physics related resources. TIPTOP utilized (at the time) new technologies to handle a news system, a job database, a conference database, and an improved web directory for physics. TIPTOP was the first major site to use PHP with mySQL, today a highly popular combination. Already in 1995, TIPTOP also had one of the first embryos of a wiki, called the Living Encyclopedia of Physics, that offered community based-editing, an editorial system and peer review, as well as automatic cross linking.