[HN Gopher] Internet Artifacts
___________________________________________________________________
Internet Artifacts
Author : mikerg87
Score : 600 points
Date : 2025-05-13 11:49 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (neal.fun)
(TXT) w3m dump (neal.fun)
| silisili wrote:
| I'm not sure how younger folks would feel seeing this...perhaps
| that it's ugly, less useful, sparse. And they'd be a bit right.
|
| But for me this was a hit of pure nostalgia, flipping item to
| item. Almost like looking through an old photo album of memories
| you'd forgotten years back. Thanks Neal for putting it together.
|
| Slightly fun fact - the original Space Jam site stayed intact
| until 2021!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210105185246/https://www.space...
| al_borland wrote:
| They actually left the original Space Jam site up. I think the
| developers knew its importance.
|
| https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
| silisili wrote:
| Nice! Never knew that. I wish more companies with popular
| sites did this. I'm sure it cost them about no money nor time
| to just shovel it off like this.
| Lammy wrote:
| >look inside
|
| >Google Analytics
| reddalo wrote:
| They moved everything under /1996 when the new movie came
| out, and while doing so they broke some pages.
| dag11 wrote:
| Oh man I forgot all about <frameset> and <frame> tags to
| create navigation. From the early days before we had dynamic
| sites or static site generators with templates, we had our
| browsers do our "templating" for us!
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| frameset was THE basis for building manual-style resources
| back in the day!
|
| * nav header; search (if you could figure out how to make
| it work)
|
| * Table of contents
|
| * main content pane
|
| fun times!
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I love how the new Space Jam website is ALSO in the 90's
| style! https://www.spacejam.com/2021/
| slyall wrote:
| They managed to break https://www.spacejam.com/ though. It
| redirects to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ which has a
| bad cert and then goes into a redirect loop.
|
| So broken after just 4 years
| genewitch wrote:
| Hey give Disney a break they're a small company with only a
| few employees. Maybe tbe certifier is on vacation.
| backspace_ wrote:
| Looney toons is a Warner Brothers property, not Disney.
| genewitch wrote:
| I wasn't thinking. you are of course correct. My brain
| conflated because both are based in burbank. yeah, that's
| what i am going with.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Hmm, I didn't get a redirect
| https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/
| shakna wrote:
| I got the loop in both desktop Chrome and Firefox, as
| well as Android Chrome, Brave and Firefox (though these
| timed out after a few loops, unlike the desktop).
|
| Were you maybe on Safari/iOS?
| a57721 wrote:
| http://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ responds with "HTTP
| 301, Location: https://www.spacejam.com/"
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I never particularly liked 50's or 60's aesthetic, and always
| puzzled over how my parents could gush so hard over it.
|
| Now, I totally get it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A photo album that gets more and more depressing.
| silisili wrote:
| If your album is roughly chronological like mine... watching
| the kids grow up, yourself and your spouse get fatter and
| grayer....they -do- get more and more depressing :).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, so like life I guess. :-(
|
| (Although you may have read recently as I have that 50
| years old seems to be peak happiness for people self-
| reporting happiness.)
| causality0 wrote:
| I found having to keep backtracking because one swipe advanced
| two or three screens to be very annoying.
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm disappointed that Bad Apple!! is not there.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| I don't think bad apple was that big or important. I have just
| recently discovered it and I've been surfing since 1996
| casey2 wrote:
| I'll say the same thing about all flash derivatives.
| kome wrote:
| also, why scaruffi.com is not there?
| coldpie wrote:
| It's been so bizarre to see that spike in popularity in the
| past couple years. I was big into Touhou in high school in the
| early-mid 2000s. I listened to Bad Apple and the rest of the
| IOSYS Touhou library on burned CD-Rs in my car (yeah I was
| super cool). Then, 20 years later the tune is suddenly
| everywhere, hahah.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Bad Apple is basically "Doom" of music video. It has display
| ? It can play bad apple.
|
| it's quite understandable. The video is in monochrome so very
| easy to display, the animation is smooth and the detail is
| not too demanding, so even on low resolution display you can
| tell it's Bad Apple
| al_borland wrote:
| The hours I wasted on that helicopter game. It was the Flappy
| Bird of its day.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music was updated in 2019. Forever
| ago in Internet years but more recent than the original.
| rchaud wrote:
| It is now an overengineered and soulless website lacking all
| the personality that made the original a classic. It somehow
| manages to also be laggy on modern machines.
| pests wrote:
| > Geocities had an interactive 2D map, allowing users to navigate
| through these virtual spaces. (1994)
|
| I got online around ~10 years old in ~1998 and got into web dev
| soon after. I remember using Geocities and Angelfire and
| FortuneWeb and all that but I do not remember this interactive 2D
| map. I do remember the various "communities" or neighborhoods but
| not this. Was it gone by this point or was I just so focused on
| the free hosting I never noticed?
|
| It took me a long time to realize the web was so new back when I
| started out, less then a decade old itself. Pretty surreal to see
| where its gone.
| dev-slash-zero wrote:
| I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of
| Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly
| as late as 2010.
| Loughla wrote:
| I thought that was basic common Internet knowledge, that Digg
| led straight to Reddit.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| Digg is being relaunched - with Alexis on board.
|
| A bunch of the early internet brands are being
| rebranded/relaunched which is collectively is being branded as
| the nostalgic internet.
|
| Napster, Limewire, Digg, GeoCities...to name a few
| latexr wrote:
| > A bunch of the early internet brands are being
| rebranded/relaunched
|
| More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and
| tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another
| paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker
| and an AI cryptocurrency1; GeoCities I'm not aware of a
| revival.
|
| > which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic
| internet.
|
| Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the
| old internet. The names are the same and some founders may
| have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely
| different.
|
| 1 Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-
| on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
| throwawaycities wrote:
| Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs
| and PE groups.
|
| Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years
| ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company
| immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
|
| So yeah it's acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to
| friends that are using someone else's funds. Considering
| the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving
| golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and
| shutting them down) - it's very nostalgic.
| rchaud wrote:
| Napster is so old that I remember its DMCA-compliant
| reboot from 20 years ago. My college gave students free
| access to it, all the music was a DRM'd WMA file. Most
| people who used it also downloaded a DRM-removal program
| to be able to put it on shared drives and MP3 players.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Alexis on board" has about as much value as saying "Richard
| Branson is an investor". The difference in their goals now vs
| when they were young and hungry is in orders of magnitude.
| They are old, out of touch and spread too thin to do anything
| noteworthy in rebooting an old brand. They're lending their
| name for credibility, in exchange for equity and board seats.
| tantalor wrote:
| fark.com
| 0xEF wrote:
| Fark feels like the echo of a dream these days. It's like the
| Friendster of news aggregators; it came on the scene first,
| set the tone for everything that followed, then faded from
| memory.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I only knew it through the lens of it being a (good natured)
| punching bag of somethingawful.com. Today it's still up and
| being updated regularly, while somethingawful hasn't had a
| new article in half a decade+.
| the_af wrote:
| Something Awful is also missing from this history. Maybe
| too niche? Though for geeks and gamers it was well known,
| and (checks Wikipedia) it was launched on 1999...
|
| It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of
| the era.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think it might not be well-known how much of current
| internet culture cascaded out from the hive that was the
| SA forums. 4chan was started by an SA goon, as was
| bellingcat, for example.
| the_af wrote:
| Wow. I knew about 4chan but not about bellingcat having
| its roots in SA.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| Drew Curtis Presents Drew Curtis' Fark.com By Drew Curtis
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| "...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half
| of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore,
| there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible
| for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you
| do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company
| with that many employees and have a far more interesting and
| diverse front page... "
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...
| rchaud wrote:
| Most people visited Digg for the comments, not so much the
| posts themselves.
| NoSalt wrote:
| My social media path is this:
|
| SpyMac - Slashdot - Digg - Reddit
|
| Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a
| Reddit link.
| lucyjojo wrote:
| would be cool for it to be less west/america-centric.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| You mean the Internet? ;-)
| kome wrote:
| I was thinking the same. this is a very american centric vision
| of the internet - especially when it comes to the websites
| mentioned
| 47282847 wrote:
| Works for me as a German, online since 96.
|
| Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural
| background and how you experienced the net!
| kome wrote:
| what about https://web.archive.org/web/20010630195810/http:
| //www.fireba... or studiVZ, knuddels, or even xing, for
| example?
|
| now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the
| late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and
| any historiography of the early internet should consider
| that, indeed.
| 0xEF wrote:
| > Oh please yes create a version that applies to your
| cultural background and how you experienced the net!
|
| As an American, I'd love to see this. Been online since AOL
| came on 3.5" floppies, but I know the US-centric version is
| only half the story. An example I was exploring recently
| was Tetetext which I have no memory of in the US. From what
| I understand, only a handful of bigger cities tried it and
| it simply was not that popular here. Growing up, we also
| had the perception that the BBC, in general, was a stuffy
| old news corp and had no real idea about the BBC Micro
| since Commodore and Atari dominated here. As an adult, it
| feels like I missed out on half the computing world back
| before things became a bit more interconnected.
|
| If someone is up for making such a site, I'd be interested
| in watching or even contributing if I have anything
| valuable to offer.
| romanhn wrote:
| I was online (in the US) since mid-90s as well, so
| definitely many of these artifacts resonate. That said, I
| was also a new transplant from Russia so was looking for
| anything I could find from my homeland - there was very
| little. I could probably count Russian-language websites
| (those I could find, anyways) on my fingers, and they all
| IIRC were university-based. I do believe there was a lively
| BBS tradition via FidoNet, but I never got into that. Circa
| '97 I was stoked to find a .wav fragment of a new song
| (still remember which one!), the first audio file I
| happened upon. By 2000 Russian-speaking web was huge and I
| was downloading music videos and full movies from FTP
| dumps.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| That's a byproduct of being a site made by an English speaker.
|
| Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from
| languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people
| from other places and speakers of other languages to make their
| own versions of this site.
|
| And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has
| their own history. It's worth recording.
| yaky wrote:
| Here are some staples of the 2000s runet that I recall (haven't
| been there since then really)
|
| - bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some
| classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its
| own thing)
|
| - Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.
|
| - Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled
| and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.
| bibelo wrote:
| When I see Neal, I know it's gonna be Fun
| garylkz wrote:
| I remember researching about early era of internet while trying
| to make a game for a game jam about online shopping, and damn, it
| sure is a deep rabbit hole.
| jofzar wrote:
| I was blown away with how great of a website and resource this
| was and the way that things loaded (to emulate old internet) then
| saw it was neal.fun
|
| Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.
| cgannett wrote:
| Gotta love a Neal.fun post
| jrowen wrote:
| Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when
| it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine
| article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with
| people in beds in different rooms.
|
| Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from
| "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets"
| in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to
| purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a
| cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
| pavlov wrote:
| Maybe they came into money in 1976: somebody got an
| inheritance, they recruited a whale, etc.
|
| That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the
| leader doesn't want the people with the money exposed to the
| outside world.
| jbeninger wrote:
| Cults will surprise you. When like-minded people are willing to
| put everything they have into a project, 18 hours a day with no
| breaks, they can accomplish a lot.
| jrowen wrote:
| Oh I've seen Wild Wild Country, that made sense to me and
| there's a logical thread to follow. Osho was also (for some
| time) a legitimately intelligent and charismatic
| leader/writer/philosopher able to rally smart people.
|
| The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute
| super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then
| emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of
| anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO
| docuseries.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| As fun as the opportunity to reminisce about the likes of line
| rider was, I'm disappointed to see the omission of clippy, the
| wayback machine, livejournal, yahoo answers, something awful,
| google groups, xkcd, temple OS, stumbleupon, lycos, activex,
| toolbars, ytmnd, hypercam, winrar, Ted Stevens, slashdot and
| doubleclick.
|
| Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
| forferdet wrote:
| In terms of internet culture, newgrounds deserves a mention!
| Technically still up, but not the same, as with most things.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Recently posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943407 (1
| comment)
|
| Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71
| comments)
| Funes- wrote:
| Nice site. I miss the pre social media, pre-hypercommercial, pre
| mass surveillance Internet of old. It was mostly the product of
| genuine, sincere self-expression. Now it feels and even works
| like an infomercial, a scam, everywhere you look, filled to the
| brim with grifters and corporations trying to take ahold of your
| attention (and money). It's disgusting and inefficient at almost
| anything you attempt to do on it because of that terrible fact.
| It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of
| the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the
| modern world, and its enforcers: normies. For many, many years
| now, it's been the exact opposite: it's turned into the epitome
| of what it helped us escape from, and it permeates every moment
| of our waking lives, directly or indirectly.
|
| The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's
| presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| > It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out
| of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of
| the modern world
|
| This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of
| the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the
| modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely
| absent.
|
| Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still
| out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
|
| The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for
| the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the
| grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
| yaky wrote:
| Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0].
| It's lightweight on purpose, and the capsules (gemini "sites")
| are mostly text. There are aggregators [1] and even search [2].
|
| 0: https://geminiprotocol.net/
|
| 1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
|
| 2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
| Funes- wrote:
| >Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol
| [0].
|
| Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively
| trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web,
| my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too,
| including gemini, which I really liked.
| dspillett wrote:
| WRT "You Wouldn't Steal a Car":
|
| _> ironically, the ad's music was used without the creator's
| permission._
|
| The font was not correctly licensed either.
| the_af wrote:
| Also, we can safely say the advert completely failed on its
| mission.
|
| I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and
| mocking terms.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half
| thousand years, internet lore passed out of all knowledge. Until,
| when chance came, the lore ensnared a new bearer.
| ashishact wrote:
| Beautiful. Would be helpful to see dates as well
| 3by7 wrote:
| Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and...
| goatse.
| linsomniac wrote:
| So today you woke up and chose violence? :-)
| bee_rider wrote:
| I miss the days when I would be a dumbass teenager online and
| somebody would, appropriately, send me to goatse or meatspin or
| something.
|
| Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels
| you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.
| textfiles wrote:
| http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Cool, well there goes my afternoon to watch Strong Bad Emails.
| pbronez wrote:
| Love Tom's Diner, didn't know it was used as an early mp3
| benchmark.
| srvmshr wrote:
| For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the
| Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link,
| which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working
| version
|
| https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )
|
| It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history.
| When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a
| college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs.
| Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the
| biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with
| the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.
|
| By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for
| Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I
| understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape
| codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point &
| took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used
| probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1
|
| Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my
| installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is
| circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more
| winding path from top to bottom.
|
| Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something
| like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which
| is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code.
| Here is the "About" description:
|
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2)
| Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
|
| [0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download
| the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
| textfiles wrote:
| It's not THAT rare to see a working version.
|
| http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/netscape/
| cainxinth wrote:
| So fun! I adore everything this guy makes!
| alnwlsn wrote:
| It's a shame it ended right when I started. There's at least a
| generation or two or three of cool stuff between 2007 and now.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| I remember "copypasta" was a hit during late 2000s
| oceansky wrote:
| "It was responsible for one of the first online web purchases - A
| large pepperoni and mushroom pizza, with extra cheese."
|
| Two students had already sold weed to each other over two decades
| prior.
| james_chu wrote:
| Thank you for letting me see the development process of
| computers. This is an incredible experience, truly unforgettable.
| Seeing Yahoo from 1994 was amazing. The interactive exhibit is
| fantastic, and I really love this
| casey2 wrote:
| Shame that the Iphone killed the internet seems like it had
| potential
| rchaud wrote:
| This doesn't get said enough. The widescreen desktop Internet
| (even at 800 x 600) was far more creative and fun than the
| modern transactional app world. The 2008-10 era iOS apps being
| a rare exception, but that too was snuffed out due to changing
| App Store guidelines that punished silly apps and favoured the
| recurring revenue cargo cult.
| youheard wrote:
| the site design is beautiful
| jhbadger wrote:
| And I didn't notice at first, but many of the exhibits are
| interactive. For example the entry of the Hacker's Dictionary
| looks like just a picture of a terminal with an entry from the
| dictionary displayed, but the image is "live" and you can
| scroll through the entire dictionary!
| jetrink wrote:
| I jumped over to the Wikipedia page of early blogger Justin Hall
| to see what he's up to. He has another distinction that he can
| probably claim: The longest recorded gap between registering a
| domain and finally using it to start a business.
|
| "In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief
| Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation
| delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he
| registered in 1994."
| rob wrote:
| I think domains were even free in 1994. I think the owner of
| rob.com told me he just had to send in a form or something back
| then.
| qingcharles wrote:
| They were. I think it was 1995 they started charging? I had
| dozens of domains. There was a simple text file form you had
| to type over. Then they started charging $200/2yr for
| .com/.net/.org and a lot of us let our domains go which ended
| up being worth tens of millions a few years later during the
| boom.
|
| (the story at the time of what killed the "free" is that
| Unilever mailed in 19,000 forms; one for each of their
| registered trademarks)
| chubot wrote:
| That reminded me of Orkut, which was a social networking
| product, but created by Orkut Buyukkokten.
|
| So he just reused his personal domain name for the product!
| https://orkut.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut
| dekhn wrote:
| later, he held onto hello.com for years with a "coming soon!
| the next network from orkut!" Supposedly you could get an
| invite but I don't know anybody who ever actually used it.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| This reminds me of the joke about the guy who couldn't afford
| a vanity number plate for his car so he changed his name to
| CK-16450
| simonlc wrote:
| Was WASD even around back during doom2?
| the_af wrote:
| Very cool.
|
| Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early
| internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy
| how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar
| Runner. It still feels like yesterday.
|
| Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy
| Bird"!
|
| I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some
| interesting artifacts beyond that date.
| SchwKatze wrote:
| Super cool!! I used to play a lot of flash games in my childhood,
| pure nostalgia
| alexpotato wrote:
| This was amazing and reminded me of the first time I heard an
| mp3.
|
| I was a freshman in college (Fall 1997) and the only music we had
| access to was either CDs or the radio.
|
| Technically, you could download a .wav of a song but it was super
| slow (even on fast university networks) and they were huge so you
| couldn't save that many on the hard drives of the time.
|
| One day, I hear multiple songs coming from my room. Songs that
| neither I nor my roommate had on CDs. And it clearly wasn't the
| radio as the songs kept switching quickly with no commercials.
|
| I distinctly remember thinking "Wait, how is he doing that? He
| doesn't have those songs!"
|
| Makes me wonder what technology is going to have that impact on
| my kids.
| sitkack wrote:
| It is AI, you can talk and have computers respond.
| archon1410 wrote:
| The "first MP3", without the background music, and just the
| voice, sounds a lot better to me than the original I listened to
| on YouTube. I liked the MP3 more.
|
| Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing
| stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good,
| but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person
| singing without music I guess, something poetic.
| meta-meta wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Nnl51fYpmdg?si=6Y2GhqfP_r0ArVHm&t=11
| pimlottc wrote:
| The acapella version of "Tom's Diner" is, in fact, the
| original. The dance version was first put out as an
| unauthorized remix, but Suzanne Vega liked it and they
| negotiated an agreement.
| pingou wrote:
| How does Heaven's Gate server manage to stay online? Do they also
| update it to keep up with security patches or that isn't
| necessary?
| textfiles wrote:
| There are members of the cult who took the sacrifice to not
| follow the others to the comet and maintain the cult's presence
| and memory on the doomed Earth. They give interviews now and
| then.
| lossolo wrote:
| No mention of AltaVista?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
|
| PS. Astalavista was also fun :)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
| vt240 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that is pretty glaring omission. To myself at
| least, Altavista was a huge part of that small slice of time,
| where it seemed instantly, the whole world finally got online
| with dial-up PPP, opposed to earlier when we might have been
| accessing the internet through gateways at a BBS, or dialup
| shell access from the local library or ISP.
|
| I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college
| campus at the time.
| jmmv wrote:
| Really cool website. I like the interactivity of every little
| artifact.
|
| The progressive loading of images in the "embedded browsers" is
| annoying though. I'm not sure if it's because all images "load"
| at the same speed (this wasn't true with dialup), or if it's
| because the animation gets old very quickly.
| metadat wrote:
| Lots of great memories beautifully bottled up and impeccably
| presented (as we've come to expect from Neal). I was hoping the
| million dollar homepage would be included, and wasn't
| disappointed. :-)
|
| Did anyone else notice how the audio stops playing when you slide
| to the next screen, _except for zombo.com_? Haha.
|
| Related Artifacts:
|
| _" Here comes another bubble"_ -
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmNDym6CvQ (dotcom startup boom)
|
| _BonziBUDDY_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
| (predatory browser extension dressed up as your friend)
|
| _Digg_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg (reddit predecessor)
|
| _RuneScape_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape /
| https://play.runescape.com/
|
| _Ultima Online_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online /
| https://uo.com
|
| _Demoscene_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
|
| _Warez_ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups
|
| I'm sure there were other notable phenomenons that didn't make
| the cut, what did I miss?
| ErneX wrote:
| Instant messaging apps like ICQ for example.
| pawanjswal wrote:
| Crazy to think this humble network of 111 terminals basically
| sparked the entire internet revolution!
| drivers99 wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see some early versions of wired.com. For
| a while, they had constantly changing visually impressive things
| going on that I didn't even know were possible with HTML /
| browsers of the time.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| > Appearing in 1997, Ask Jeeves revolutionized search by allowing
| users to make queries with natural language
|
| Man Ask Jeeves was way overhead its time.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ask Jeeves as a search engine was pretty awful. The natural
| language thing was a UX gimmick because it was a time when
| internet users wrote in full sentences. The pendulum has now
| swung the other way where the search engine now writes out
| things for us because its users can't write more than 140 chars
| at a time.
| hoshikihao wrote:
| very interesting
| spoonsort wrote:
| That just reminded me of original 128MB MP3 players, loaded
| straight from Napster. Ironically, I still struggle to fill an
| average sized modern equivalent with 512GB, even with FLAC.
| Dwedit wrote:
| It mentions a few classic flash movies, but doesn't mention the
| Flash hosting site Newgrounds.
| accrual wrote:
| This was fantastic. There are so many possible artifacts that
| could be covered. Would be cool if each year could be extended to
| include multiple artifacts! The "Ultimate Showdown" song is
| apparently still perfectly preserved in my mind. :)
| joeframbach wrote:
| When I think early 2000s I think Jagex Games Domain Castle.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Les horribles Cernettes (the band pictured in "the first photo on
| the internet") have a music video on youtube for their song
| "Collider" if you want to hear it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf4bmANuR-c
| mdb333 wrote:
| surprised no mention of Craigslist? or is it not an "Internet
| artifact" because it remains in essentially its original form...?
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(page generated 2025-05-15 23:01 UTC)