When Suffolk radio arrived on the web

If you have landed here from a radio directory or an old bookmark, you were probably after a file called sgrfm.ram or a page called sir.htm. They lived on this domain, they carried Suffolk radio, and they stopped working somewhere in the middle of the 2000s. This page explains what they were and why the links outlasted the files by twenty years.

What a .ram file actually was

The links that still point here mostly end in .ram, and almost nobody under forty has knowingly opened one.

A .ram file was not audio. It was a tiny text file — often a single line — containing the address of a RealAudio stream. You clicked it, your browser handed it to RealPlayer, and RealPlayer went off and opened the stream itself. It was a bookmark pretending to be a media file, invented because the web of the late 1990s had no way to play continuous audio on its own.

That indirection is exactly why these links have survived. A .ram file is a few dozen bytes and trivial to list in a directory, so radio directories catalogued them in their thousands. The station moved, the stream address changed, the file stopped resolving — and the directory entry stayed exactly where it was.

Why a county website was doing this at all

It is easy to forget how unusual this was. Putting a local radio station online in about 1999 meant someone had to run the encoder, pay for the bandwidth, and keep a server answering. A commercial station might do it. A county website doing it for local stations was genuinely notable, and it is the reason this domain still turns up in radio listings decades after it went quiet.

The archived structure shows the audio scattered across several addresses over the years — /audio/, /lifestyle/radio/, /suffolkweb/lifestyle/radio/ — which is the signature of a site reorganised more than once while the old paths were left answering. That is also why the surviving links point at four or five different addresses for what was probably the same handful of streams.

What we can and cannot tell you

We should be straight about the limits here, because this is local history and local history deserves better than confident guessing.

What the record shows. The Internet Archive holds about 4,400 URLs from this domain between 1997 and 2006. Audio files appear under several paths across those years. Radio directories and personal sites still link to them, which is how we found them at all — they are the largest cluster of surviving links this domain has.

What we have not verified. Which stations, in which years, under what arrangement, and who ran the encoding. We have not read the pages themselves: the Internet Archive was offline while this site was being built, so we have the index of what existed but not the contents. Rather than fill that gap with plausible-sounding detail, we have left it empty.

If you were involved — at a station, at the original Suffolk Web, or just as someone who listened this way — we would genuinely like to know, and we will correct and extend this page with credit. Get in touch.

Why this page exists

It would have been easier to point those old radio links at the homepage, or at a services page, and take the credit. That is the usual thing to do with an expired domain, and it is a small dishonesty: someone clicks a link about Suffolk radio and lands on an advert for an AI consultancy.

So instead the radio addresses land here, on a page that is actually about what they were. The rest of the old site's addresses go to the heritage note, which explains what suffolkweb.co.uk was between 1997 and 2006 and where the line sits between that history and this company.

The short version of that line: the history belongs to the address. Fleeta Limited registered the lapsed domain in September 2026 and trades as Suffolk Web. We are not the people who ran it, we did not write any of it, and we do not claim their work.

What we will do is keep the old addresses answering, which is more than they have done for twenty years.