> htaccess would have been your friend

htaccess didn't exist in 1996.

This site ran on IIS 1.0 on Windows NT 3.51. For scripting we used a prerelease Coldfusion version. (i.e. the version before 1.0, which was released as we were developing the site, partially based on feedback we provided as we tested it.)

> How did you prevent any visitor from deleting the site?

A security token in the url which was secret. The worry was that some admin would try to submit the site to altavista for indexing without removing the token from the url first.