Quite simply, the person in charge of the web site. In those days, it was likely to be the person who wrote the HTML, wrote the content and set up the web server.

There are still quite a lot of them about in smaller companies - they keep Wordpress patched, post news stories, update pages etc.

Ah! Those were the days when there were no admins, there were 'webmasters'! They were the people behind building and maintaining the website. Think webdev + ops. Nothing today compares to the grandeur of being a 'Webmaster' in 1996 :)

It's what we used to call anyone who was a web developer back then. Bit of a mix between a system admin and front-end developer with maybe some perl tinkering in place.

It's embarrassing to say but in my company, I'm still "the webmaster". And by reading your question I conclude that it's because no one has any idea about what I'm doing.

It used to be convention that emails to webmaster@[domain.com] would go to whoever was responsible for maintaining the website. I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however.

there was also this thing between webmasters, called banner exchange. that's how you got new traffic to your website. i remember when i did my first gaming review site up in high school i was trying to get my banner to as many other sites as i could and they would get the place on my site. i remember tweaking my banner in macromedia flash :)

Person who built the website & is responsible for its uptime.

damn it, thanks for making me feel old at the ripe age of 26 T_T