27 ms·

Why there’s so little left of the early internet

448 points by seagullz 8y ago

iamgopal 8y ago
Am I the only one who is seeing this sudden surge of bbc.com linked articles ? Not that I'm complaining. When people started making pages for Search Engine instead of Human Consumptions, Internet died. "Light on information and Heavy on keywords and linking" sites and pages flooded the internet, through which finding the actual content, needs another level of skill. I think solution to this is, an AI based open source browser extension, which find relevant page from search engine result depending upon its usefulness index. ( or just show its usefulness index, along side the result, in short sabotaging the Google search results ;) ). Is there anything similar available ?
- blfr 8y ago
  It's an Eternal September problem, not a search engine problem. Whenever I use search like a proper normie to buy something, check song lyrics, or weather, the results are excellent.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    On that note, lately it seems Google results are more and more about what’s ”popular” in some sense instead of what’s relevant, especially when your search term has multiple meanings. Two recent examples of things I’ve run into are ”cloud” (pages and pages of cloud computing results, no mention about the meteorological phenomenon) and ”thrush” (nothing about the songbird family, just dozens of results about the yeast infection). Whether I’m logged in or use private browsing doesn’t make much difference. Not sure what has changed, but I’m used to Google giving a more representative sample of different meanings of a search term.
    - hedora 8y ago
      Duck Duck Go has a similar problem for cloud and thrush, but if you click the “meanings” tab, it lets you switch results over to what you meant, and then gives decent results. More broadly, DDG implements UI features that allow users to clarify their intent, while Google focuses on using machine learning to infer intent. When things go sideways, this means DDG empowers users, and google overrides them. Disclaimer: I switched away from google search years ago, and now I find its user interface completely baffling. Maybe I just don’t know how to use it any more, and there is some override I’ve overlooked. Also, I’m kind of shocked by how many corporate logos and spam links fly by when I scroll down the Google results for “cloud”. It feels like the 90’s internet before animated gifs and the blink tag were invented. In fairness to google, ddg has a similar number of logos, but they’re each approximately the size of one normal sized character, not one third the width of the screen like in google.
      - lol768 8y ago
        > Duck Duck Go has a similar problem for cloud and thrush, but if you click the “meanings” tab, it lets you switch results over to what you meant, and then gives decent results. This is a good idea but not well implemented. For example, searching Python displays a relevant carousel of "meanings" - you have the snake represented, and the programming language. But choosing an item from the list simply changes the search term. This is particularly bad with "Ruby". Perform a search for Ruby and then click the 'a pink to blood-red colored gemstone' meaning. Observe that the top result now that you have clarified is "Ruby Programming Language".
    - pubutil 8y ago
      But are relevance and popularity not related? If more people are using Google to learn about cloud computing than the clouds in the sky, I’d hazard that that would make cloud computing the more relevant result, in terms of what Google sees anyway. It’s tricky, though, because I’d say that the clouds in the sky are more relevant to humanity as a whole. Not everyone cares about or needs to think about cloud computing.
      - Sharlin 8y ago
        Both are relevant meanings and should be included in top results. Perhaps Google should have a disambiguation feature like Wikipedia does (and DuckDuckGo does according to another commenter).
        pubutil 8y ago
        I absolutely agree with you there. In the meantime, adding additional descriptors yields better results but is maybe a bit un-intuitive to some users (e.g. "thrush bird" rather than "thrush").
        nostrademons 8y ago
        They used to - I remember pushing this feature hard when working on the search visual redesign in 2010, and getting the response that it was just a really hard engineering problem. The back-end teams delivered sometime in late 2011, and IIRC it was live in the left-nav (remember when Google had a left-nav?) for a few months to a year. It was unlaunched eventually because nobody ever clicked on it. It turns out that disambiguation is a relatively rare feature for people to want when most of the query stream is navigational queries, and it's contrary to Google's goal of getting you to your answer as quick as possible (2 clicks if it were a UI feature vs. one click if the result were just in the results). AFAIK the backend is still live, but it triggers off keywords in the query rather than any UI element. If you search for [cloud weather] 100% of the results are about the meteorological phenomena, if you search for [thrush bird] 100% of the results are about the songbird, if you search for [jaguar car] 100% of the results are about the car, and if you search for [python snake] 100% of the results are about the reptile.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      It's even worse than that - it also appears to learn synonyms from popular usage, even when it is incorrect or misleading. For example, when it comes to firearms, there are two completely different parts called "extractor" and "ejector", that people often confuse because of similar sounding names. So now, when you search for "AR extractor removal", the first hit on Google is about ejectors; and it specifically highlights the word "ejector" as bold, as if it came from the search query: https://www.google.com/search?q=AR+extractor+removal https://www.google.com/search?q=AR+extractor+removal
- thekingofh 8y ago
  The solution is they need to bring back webrings.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Federated search (please don't say "AI") may eventually become part of the internet. It's garbage now, and the skills required to make it go are generally employed at google, bing or yandex, but it's one of those things that should have happened.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > Am I the only one who is seeing this sudden surge of bbc.com linked articles ? Not that I'm complaining. I think it comes in waves. There was a surge of TechCrunch articles the other day. I noticed because they're blacklisted in pi-hole due to their crappy UI.
schwartzworld 8y ago
Websites got a lot less fun at some point too. A lot of the designs seem dated now, but I really miss the days when websites had brightly colored text over load backgrounds. Obviously modern sites are more usable, but I want <blink> tags back.
- FussyZeus 8y ago
  That and 2/3rds of websites are just Shopify templates, etc. I suppose this is the natural progression as a given thing becomes more accessible, that the things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. It reminds of cars, actually, how back in the early days every car was unique because when you bought a "car" what you received was a chassis, engine, wheels, etc. and then you'd take that to a coach builder who'd finish the job to your liking. Then as time went on, things got standardized (for cars, it was manufacturers and models, for websites, it's companies like Shopify, Wordpress, Joomla, etc. and then slowly everything gets paired down into what is generally agreed upon as the "correct" set of features, and they all just look a bit the same. And then of course you occasionally have a teenager who fits a great stereo to a Mazda or something, but by and large, everything is pretty much standardized. I know it's more efficient, but it's terribly boring.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. I'd argue that fewer people can do it now (relative to the Internet population) than previously, because free webspace is dead, the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it), ftp is dead, DMCA, GDPR, hackers are scary, HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design). The web is a playing field for larger corporations now and most people and small entities have given up and just maintain a FB/IG presence.
    - gsich 8y ago
      Desktop isn't dead, neither is (by extension) laptop.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I've been doing some research on videogaming in the 90s and I run across so many dead links to things that even archive.org doesn't have. The thing that is really frustrating is that there were a handful of psuedo-podcasts with interviews from game developers that are all gone because they were posted in real audio.
- bshipp 8y ago
  if you're finding stuff that's not on archive.org just append web.atchive.org/save/ in front of the url to get the crawler to capture it. I used to have a chrome and Firefox JavaScript bookmarklet to do it in one click but that doesn't work anymore.
  - bshipp 8y ago
    oh, for the love of...two hours into work and I read this thread and there's a fat-fingered spelling error that I can't edit anymore. The url is obviously http://web.archive.org/save/https://<url-to-be-saved> http://web.archive.org/save/https://<url-to-be-saved>
blfr 8y ago
if I ever needed to show proof of my time there it would only be a Google search away On that topic, has anyone discovered why Google deep-six'd Usenet archives it acquired with Deja News? You used to be able to find specific posts from specific posters with by: and other operators. Sometime in the aughts it degraded quickly to the point where I can't find threads from which I have explicit excerpts and full author names. Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history? Did it just fall in disrepair?
- Tepix 8y ago
  There was no business model for Google with an open, decentralized Usenet. They tried to replace it with Google Groups and later Google Plus.
  - blfr 8y ago
    It explains why they never had a good Usenet client but why is the content not really searchable anymore?
    - gdulli 8y ago
      I'd imagine that a body of content that's largely from the pre-ecommerce internet isn't of any use to Google.
  - ckastner 8y ago
    I hated Google Groups, the interface seemed so overengineered compared to the simplicity of Usenet. I believe you couldn't even view the (plaintext) posts with Javascript disabled. I have a suspicion that Stack Overflow's success can be attributed at least somewhat to the experience that was browsing comp.lang.* using Google Groups.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      I haven't looked in a while, but for a long time, the single most-voted-for bug in Google's public bug tracker was "give me some API access to the message content in Google Groups." Ironically, there is already a very simple API mechanism that could have been used to provide exactly all the information people wanted... NNTP. All Google would have to do is provide an NNTP server endpoint to Google Groups (even beyond its Usenet mirror). It's not even that hard to write an NNTP server: it's probably the easiest server to implement of POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP.
Tepix 8y ago
The answer is clear: It takes an effort to publish something on the internet. Companies and other organisations disappear and their web presence disappears with them. It takes an extra effort to create a copy. The dark web - the parts of the web that aren't easily accessible because they consist of databases, paid access areas or perhaps simply facebook posts not published as "public" - remains hidden and inaccessible to preservation efforts. There's also the problem of consuming old internet content. Do you still have a gopher client? Will old web pages look the same in your browser as they did in 1995? Flash will no longer work (hooray?). On the other hand books, photographs and magazines stick around until you throw them away and we have public institutions that are dedicated to their preservation.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  FWIW old web pages do look the same as they did in 1995, with the exception of the default background color changing from silver to white at some point for some reason. But, at least under Windows, the default fonts, colors, spacing, etc are 99% the same. Flash also works if you are using Chrome. Sadly, Firefox does not support Flash plugin anymore (and i say sadly because just yesterday i was trying to find some files from an old site that was made using Flash and i had to use Chrome just for that).
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Firefox still supports Flash, it just doesn't bundle it, unlike Chrome - you have to install the plugin manually. They're only slowly deprecating it starting on FF 69 (the "always activate" option will disappear, so users will have to click to activate it every time: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434)
- sebastiaand 8y ago
  > Do you still have a gopher client? This is a big problem. Firefox dropped Gopher and Chrome never supported it. Most Gopher users, presumably, use a Gopher web proxy. For fun I recently built a Gopher web client, implementing the entire protocol in a single page app (literally a single HTML file, no frameworks or dependencies). It supports most documented file formats including "modern" extras like video and audio. Gopher client: - https://gopher.commons.host https://gopher.commons.host Source code: - https://gitlab.com/commonshost/gaufre https://gitlab.com/commonshost/gaufre
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pard68 8y ago
I know of Eternal September, but is there much life left in Usenet other than for binary distribution?
- sverige 8y ago
  Not really, no.
- icedchai 8y ago
  Some obscure groups, like comp.os.vms, are actually quite active.
EamonnMR 8y ago
Whenever we get into web nostalgia I've got to post http://wiby.me http://wiby.me which is a search engine for live retro websites, a mix of modern sites with very little except text and immaculate sites from the early web that time hasn't changed.
Kiro 8y ago
I used to be involved in multiple popular things on the internet and became quite famous, even having my own "fan club". All of that is gone. Googling my old nick name yields 0 results.
- 0898 8y ago
  Care to share more?
- sneakernets 8y ago
  Same here. In the late 90's I was involved with some other kids from college creating and maintaining a site called "The Crazy Zone", where I designed some of the first JavaScript games ever made (as far as I know), including a crude breakout clone and a magic 8-Ball. We even had a chatroom applet made in Java! But it's just gone now. Can't find a trace of it.
- tsumnia 8y ago
  While not famous myself, I do get a single page of memory lane [1] about the AOL communities (plural) around the SNES game Earthbound. It isn't much, and a VERY BAD EYE SORE, but thinking back about all the stuff I said / posted / got TOS'd... I think I'm fine with that getting lost to the Aether. [1] http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/archive.html http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/archive.html
return0 8y ago
Often it's the domain renewal issue. People won't keep paying the domain for an irrelevant website, even if the hosting itself is free. OTOH, why would we want to keep everything that was ever written on the internet, forgetting is a natural process in culture.
- gugagore 8y ago
  I think there's a lot of sadness around forgetting. I'd like to preserve almost all of it, really. That's why we have stories, and care about legacy. All to avoid forgetting and being forgotten.
  - jopsen 8y ago
    Put static HTML on GitHub pages and it'll probably stay up forever.. Well, at the time scale of forever, it's always sketchy, but the odds are decent.
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Merrill 8y ago
One of the brain's most important abilities to maintain sanity is the ability to forget the unimportant and remember the important. The internet will need that ability as it becomes more intelligent. Having AI reasoning based on vast pools of fake news and other disinformation would not be a good thing.
newaccoutnas 8y ago
For some nostaligia, poke around http://www.webring.org/ http://www.webring.org/
gambler 8y ago
The web has nothing built-in for archiving and versioning. It's a gaping hole in this technological platform, one that has been noted and criticized for a very long time. The reality of this problem, however, is vehemently denied by the current generation of "technologists". Of course, those are the same people who get six-digit salaries for managing complexity they themselves create - partly through hyper-centralization. Good and resilient archival, on the other hand, necessarily implies some level of decentralization. I singlehandedly maintain a 14-year-old website that used to be a modestly popular web magazine. It's not very expensive, but it's a pain. DNS system is horrible and it's easy to loose domain names to some nonsense. (I lost one that used to be a free 2nd level domain when it was converted to a paid-for zone. Not a matter of money, just paperwork.) Server management is a time drain. Stuff like adding SSL certificate to a legacy VPS can lead to a cascade of updates and config changes that can take days to make and test. BTW, everyone sings praises to archive.org (and it's well-deserved), but most people here do not seem to realize that they are also a centralized platform that can collapse and take everything down with them. Who archives the archives, etc. Fortunately, they are not the only one of the sort. Unfortunately, it's all very ad-hoc. If W3C weren't a bunch of corporate shills, there would be a standard for creating versioned web archives, like, 10 years ago. It's obvious that we need one.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  'Archival' is an adjective. The gerund 'Archiving' has done good service as a noun for decades. (I will die on this hill.)
  - gambler 8y ago
    Fair enough. Updated.
- bo1024 8y ago
  Interesting post. So are you saying that if there was a good standard for versioned web archives, then you could stop maintaining your website and just point people to the archives?
  - 8y ago
ChrisSD 8y ago
I looked into this awhile ago and came to a similar conclusion about the web. Here's the examples of pre 1996 websites I know of (some are recreations): * The famous first web page: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... * The Global Network Navigator: http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html * Trincoll Journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20010413164311/http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010413164311/http://www.trinco... * BBC Networking Club: https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301 https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301 Anything pre 1994 is very hard to find.
- joegahona 8y ago
  I could've sworn that the CyberBoxingZone went pre-1994, but the earliest I can find is '95: http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/aolnws.htm http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/aolnws.htm Great list you've got.
- randobrando1285 8y ago
  Can't forget spacejam: https://spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm https://spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    Ha, that's great! Although it is 1996, which is much better archived then earlier years.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  Not that old (2005), but one of the earliest crowd funding projects on the net. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
  - pmarreck 8y ago
    I just found out the guy who made that also made the kinda-famous "Calm" smartphone app!
eruci 8y ago
I got sued over copyright infringement a few years back, and most of the evidence against my company consisted of screenshots of my sites/blogs from the internet archive. It is a good research tool for "who came first".
drmsucks 8y ago
It's going to get even worse now that entertainment media is being "streamed" and DRM is preventing users from making copies. Today's game servers and loot boxes are very short lived, and they aren't even selling physical disks for people to preserve and enjoy.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  The solution to this problem is a simple one: Don't buy DRM content. It's just entertainment, you can live without it.
Lord_Zero 8y ago
Simply put: It is not free to keep stuff up on the internet forever.
lawrencegs 8y ago
And this is just web. Don’t forget that we also have Apps. Some of the newer startups / media company don’t / choose not to have a web interface. We have archive for web, but not for apps. I looked at the screenshot of the first Uber & Amazon app, and it was amazing how different they look compared to today (2019)
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pcr910303 8y ago
Isn’t the distributed nature of web making this super hard? Everyone can buy a new domain, everyone can structure one’s website differently, everyone can stop publishing content in any date. Innovative ideas about distribution and structure pop out frequently and change how data is served. It’s different from usual publication where publishers are needed to publish content, structure has not changed since the B.C. era when books were invented, and data is physical. We started archiving publications long after they were invented; the web was made only 20 years ago. I’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense, and people will have to study web with ones that survived, just like how we study papyrus or the Rosetta’s stone.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > It’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense That's actually easy - it's literally what blockchains are for. The whole issue is how to manage the tradeoff between reliably archiving everything (and expecting participants in the network to do the same, so that the system doesn't end up relying on a single point of failure), and delivering/serving the stuff efficiently.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - opportune 8y ago
    I don't think a long term, major content archival project is a good idea for a blockchain. Since the internet is so large, you would have to have major, major sharding (as opposed to the naive approach in bitcoin where all nodes contain the entire history). And additionally if you archive everything in an immutable datastore, you are going to end up archiving and then hosting illegal content, and afaik it is still not settled whether that constitutes a crime (in my opinion, it should).
  - pcr910303 8y ago
    IIRC blockchains are for anonymized trust, not efficient archiving, right? I'm not sure if blockchains are going to become super useful when it comes to preserving the internet... :-(
jedberg 8y ago
"While digital storage has fallen drastically in price, archiving all this material still costs money. “Who’s going to pay for it?”" This is really interesting. If you think about it, for all of our print archives, the creator bore some of the cost of archiving it. When you print a book you have to send a copy to the library of congress, so the "storage" is paid for by the publisher. Same with newspaper archives -- usually the newspaper is sent by the publisher, who pays for the "storage" (the paper and ink). I think the UK and France and many other countries have similar systems. But in the digital age, the entire cost is carried by the archiver.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  >When you print a book you have to send a copy to the library of congress As best I can tell, you only need to send two copies of a book to the Library of Congress if you want to get an LCCN. Otherwise, there's no requirement to do so, certainly not to receive copyright protection.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    That's true, but basically every publisher does it because they want an LCCN. I suppose if you self publish you don't have to. But the bigger point is that to be in the archive you have to bear some of the cost.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- Merrill 8y ago
  The cost of printing and shipping the book is only part of the cost. There are additional costs as part of the initial storage, such as the administrative function of issuing the LCCN, cataloging, and shelving the book. Once shelved, the book continues to incur the cost of shelf space in a climate controlled building. The cost of just keeping a book in a library is great enough that all but the richest academic libraries have an ongoing process of identifying and selling or destroying books with no circulation over a period of time. Usually they do so after checking whether they can borrow a copy from another library in their network should one of their patrons ask for it.
edoo 8y ago
The best page in the universe is still up! http://maddox.xmission.com/ http://maddox.xmission.com/ Like it or not it is a historical monument.
roland35 8y ago
My favorite memories of the earlier internet was hijacking Yahoo chat rooms (guns and ammo was a favorite) and singing 80's karaoke while the normal denizens became increasingly irate. Because once you took control of the microphone you got to keep it as long as you held the button down ;) Now the internet does not seem as fun and wholesome as it did back in the 90's; I feel bad that my kids don't get to enjoy that. On the plus side, maybe they can make some side income as influencers?
agumonkey 8y ago
the process of wild growth fueling the need for organization which in turns causes sclerosis is .. as mundane as strange.
denysonique 8y ago
With the new Terrorist Content Regulation by EU there will be even less left of the internet we currently have today, here is a recent open letter from Vint Cerf, Jimmy Wales, Bruce Schneier, EFF regarding the matter. http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/TCO-letter-to-rapporteurs.pdf http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/TCO-letter...
djhworld 8y ago
In some ways the 'old' web died around 2006-2007 when Facebook started to get its hooks in. MySpace was a big thing before that, where people curated their own profiles with custom HTML, then Geocities before that. When Facbeook came along it felt like a breath of fresh air at the time as the interface was clean and simple, and all your pals were there. I guess it was one of those "you don't know what you've got til its gone" things, because the sterile Facebook UI and overly corporate Instagram fiefdoms makes me really miss the old internet. The thing is though, does anyone outside of tech or media really give that much of a crap? All their pals are on Facebook/Instagram, the barrier to entry is low (no need to learn HTML/CSS/JS)
- ungzd 8y ago
  Now Instagram users have to learn how to optimize posting time and how to cheat algofeed by adding unrelated hashtags and even tuning color scheme in photos. I regularly hear about such things from casual users with 50 subscribers, not SMM workers. It's much harder than knowing <b> and <img> tags. With heavy videoization of social media, they also have to learn video montage and lighting.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I'm not disagreeing with any of this. But I think there's additional perspective to be had. I see a lot of conversation about early Internet and the health of the Internet. I think some of this is just because those of us who remember it, are starting to ache over it a bit for all kinds of reasons, one of which is because that's what old people do. Today I got lunch with my 17 year old nephew. I asked him about what he does on the Internet and if he misses the "old Internet". First off, he has no context of what the old Internet is. He doesn't really care nor seem to feel like he's missing out. Second, he showed me what he mainly does. Basically it was a handful of group chats via Signal and WhatsApp, a whole bunch of web comic websites, and some YouTube series. I felt like a dad of a teenager for a fleeting moment and my generalized conclusion was that he's consuming a ton of independently developed creative content. I was actually pretty proud of what the Internet looks like for him. I asked him about curation and the ability to hold on to his favourites. How does he ensure that something he loves isn't gone in 10 years? This concept really didn't seem to matter to him. His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff. Made me wonder if attachment to nostalgia may be fleeting as well. Is this the full story? Of course not. But it made me feel a bit better about things and a bit more skeptical of the doomsaying I often hear and sometimes take part in.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Consider instead of YouTube though broadcast TV in the old days. If you were sitting in front of the TV at the right time, you could watch the latest episode of Star Trek. (OK. I'm dating myself. Work with me here.) You might have been aware that repeats would probably air on some unknown schedule some day. But, really, maybe you'd never be able to watch that particular show again.
  - darksaints 8y ago
    And because of it, entire television writing styles have changed, morphing into strong season-long narratives instead of loosely related miniplots. Before, writers always had to take into account the fact that a viewer may not have seen the previous episode, or even any episodes at all. I much prefer what TV has become, to the point where I now prefer the medium over feature length films...something I never would have expected 20 years ago.
driverdan 8y ago
I'm still amazed that Internet Archive maintains copies of my first site from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19971222141333/http://stuff.simplenet.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19971222141333/http://stuff.simp... Many of the external links are archived too. Anyone else have links to share of their old, pre-2000 sites?
purplezooey 8y ago
That site is heavy on generic clip art photos.
Bud 8y ago
I find it sad that a post like this about the "early Internet" is really about websites. The web is, of course, not actually the "early Internet".
stesch 8y ago
Article is about the web. Clicked it because I thought it's about the early Internet.
BorisMelnik 8y ago
haven't logged in in a while, but more people should donate to archive.org - and I'm not speaking AT HN at all because statistically I'm sure HN contributes more than anyone but archive.org are truly the historians of the web and we need to support them.
Keyframe 8y ago
Time really did move fast, but it seems to have slowed down. "The early Internet" - by the end of 90's it seemed like Internet was all over the place and has been with us forever with large sites established their presence and we were on the verge of dotcom. All in all, it was only what, five or six good years (until 1999). All of THAT happened in that time span. Now, look at the last six years.
revskill 8y ago
It's about the database or where the content has gone ? It's not about the web.
nikisweeting 8y ago
I arrived a little late here, but for anyone just getting into web archiving, it's a fascinating space! We maintain a master community index with a list of all the major archiving organizations and open source tools here: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm... Some of the cooler projects apart from ArchiveBox.io: - https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb / webrecorder.io - https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet - https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb - https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io - https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler And many more blog posts, articles, projects, and organizations on the wiki!
dwd 8y ago
The Internet Archive is the closest I have to a resume of past projects. So many things I've worked on no longer exist (at least not in the same form) but can still be found there.
leoc 8y ago
Somewhat cheeky from the BBC, which has a record of permanently deleting large sections of its website much more recently than c. 1999.
nemoniac 8y ago
The title is misleading. The article is about the early Web, not the early Internet.
daggasoft 8y ago
Someone at the internet archive brought this thread to my attention. You all may be interested in checking out my project. http://theoldnet.com http://theoldnet.com The original purpose of this project was to allow vintage computers (old browsers) to surf the old net using the Internet Archive's WayBack API. But most people use it on modern computers. We just passed 100,000 pages served up yesterday. I've added a number of features to the site including a working guestbook and automatically bubbling of geocities pages to the homepage upon discovery. Two days ago I released the Old Net Navigator web browser. It's a little buggy but mostly feature complete. You can check that out here http://theoldnet.com/browser http://theoldnet.com/browser
xorand 8y ago
This lack of care is amazing. On one side there is a majority of people who react with oh, there's so much worthless stuff shared and consumed every day. On the other side there are people who realize that there is so much valuable information, which takes so little memory by today standards. Take for example Sci-Hub library of articles. It's only 70TB. Most of it is not stuff people share and like and consume like they do with Youtube or Instagram. Most of it is even old, because many recent scientific articles are available without passing through Sci-Hub. Only 70TB of valuable data, in a sea of crap. We might loose this any day. Which corporation cares about a tiny ammount of data? Or suppose you're a historian in 100 years from now. What you have as sources? Nothing? In the age where everything is posted on social media? Too bad, Google or Facebook or others like that decided to trash a huge quantity of data, most of it crap, to be sure, and a tiny quantity of unique, or hard to produce, or scientific, artistic data. Books which you can't read because MS drops a service? How many of the share-and-like people passed by the experience of writing a book?
armortech 8y ago
Spent last ~10 years to actively search each other week a small game I liked as a kid. It was on those CDs you buy with PC magazines. Even got in touch with the original author who, of course, lost it too. Found it a month ago. Can you imagine the happiness?

448 points by seagullz 8y ago

Am I the only one who is seeing this sudden surge of bbc.com linked articles ? Not that I'm complaining. When people started making pages for Search Engine instead of Human Consumptions, Internet died. "Light on information and Heavy on keywords and linking" sites and pages flooded the internet, through which finding the actual content, needs another level of skill. I think solution to this is, an AI based open source browser extension, which find relevant page from search engine result depending upon its usefulness index. ( or just show its usefulness index, along side the result, in short sabotaging the Google search results ;) ). Is there anything similar available ?

blfr 8y ago
It's an Eternal September problem, not a search engine problem. Whenever I use search like a proper normie to buy something, check song lyrics, or weather, the results are excellent.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  On that note, lately it seems Google results are more and more about what’s ”popular” in some sense instead of what’s relevant, especially when your search term has multiple meanings. Two recent examples of things I’ve run into are ”cloud” (pages and pages of cloud computing results, no mention about the meteorological phenomenon) and ”thrush” (nothing about the songbird family, just dozens of results about the yeast infection). Whether I’m logged in or use private browsing doesn’t make much difference. Not sure what has changed, but I’m used to Google giving a more representative sample of different meanings of a search term.
  - hedora 8y ago
    Duck Duck Go has a similar problem for cloud and thrush, but if you click the “meanings” tab, it lets you switch results over to what you meant, and then gives decent results. More broadly, DDG implements UI features that allow users to clarify their intent, while Google focuses on using machine learning to infer intent. When things go sideways, this means DDG empowers users, and google overrides them. Disclaimer: I switched away from google search years ago, and now I find its user interface completely baffling. Maybe I just don’t know how to use it any more, and there is some override I’ve overlooked. Also, I’m kind of shocked by how many corporate logos and spam links fly by when I scroll down the Google results for “cloud”. It feels like the 90’s internet before animated gifs and the blink tag were invented. In fairness to google, ddg has a similar number of logos, but they’re each approximately the size of one normal sized character, not one third the width of the screen like in google.
    - lol768 8y ago
      > Duck Duck Go has a similar problem for cloud and thrush, but if you click the “meanings” tab, it lets you switch results over to what you meant, and then gives decent results. This is a good idea but not well implemented. For example, searching Python displays a relevant carousel of "meanings" - you have the snake represented, and the programming language. But choosing an item from the list simply changes the search term. This is particularly bad with "Ruby". Perform a search for Ruby and then click the 'a pink to blood-red colored gemstone' meaning. Observe that the top result now that you have clarified is "Ruby Programming Language".
  - pubutil 8y ago
    But are relevance and popularity not related? If more people are using Google to learn about cloud computing than the clouds in the sky, I’d hazard that that would make cloud computing the more relevant result, in terms of what Google sees anyway. It’s tricky, though, because I’d say that the clouds in the sky are more relevant to humanity as a whole. Not everyone cares about or needs to think about cloud computing.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      Both are relevant meanings and should be included in top results. Perhaps Google should have a disambiguation feature like Wikipedia does (and DuckDuckGo does according to another commenter).
      - pubutil 8y ago
        I absolutely agree with you there. In the meantime, adding additional descriptors yields better results but is maybe a bit un-intuitive to some users (e.g. "thrush bird" rather than "thrush").
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        They used to - I remember pushing this feature hard when working on the search visual redesign in 2010, and getting the response that it was just a really hard engineering problem. The back-end teams delivered sometime in late 2011, and IIRC it was live in the left-nav (remember when Google had a left-nav?) for a few months to a year. It was unlaunched eventually because nobody ever clicked on it. It turns out that disambiguation is a relatively rare feature for people to want when most of the query stream is navigational queries, and it's contrary to Google's goal of getting you to your answer as quick as possible (2 clicks if it were a UI feature vs. one click if the result were just in the results). AFAIK the backend is still live, but it triggers off keywords in the query rather than any UI element. If you search for [cloud weather] 100% of the results are about the meteorological phenomena, if you search for [thrush bird] 100% of the results are about the songbird, if you search for [jaguar car] 100% of the results are about the car, and if you search for [python snake] 100% of the results are about the reptile.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It's even worse than that - it also appears to learn synonyms from popular usage, even when it is incorrect or misleading. For example, when it comes to firearms, there are two completely different parts called "extractor" and "ejector", that people often confuse because of similar sounding names. So now, when you search for "AR extractor removal", the first hit on Google is about ejectors; and it specifically highlights the word "ejector" as bold, as if it came from the search query: https://www.google.com/search?q=AR+extractor+removal https://www.google.com/search?q=AR+extractor+removal
thekingofh 8y ago
The solution is they need to bring back webrings.
scottlocklin 8y ago
Federated search (please don't say "AI") may eventually become part of the internet. It's garbage now, and the skills required to make it go are generally employed at google, bing or yandex, but it's one of those things that should have happened.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> Am I the only one who is seeing this sudden surge of bbc.com linked articles ? Not that I'm complaining. I think it comes in waves. There was a surge of TechCrunch articles the other day. I noticed because they're blacklisted in pi-hole due to their crappy UI.

schwartzworld 8y ago

Websites got a lot less fun at some point too. A lot of the designs seem dated now, but I really miss the days when websites had brightly colored text over load backgrounds. Obviously modern sites are more usable, but I want <blink> tags back.

FussyZeus 8y ago
That and 2/3rds of websites are just Shopify templates, etc. I suppose this is the natural progression as a given thing becomes more accessible, that the things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. It reminds of cars, actually, how back in the early days every car was unique because when you bought a "car" what you received was a chassis, engine, wheels, etc. and then you'd take that to a coach builder who'd finish the job to your liking. Then as time went on, things got standardized (for cars, it was manufacturers and models, for websites, it's companies like Shopify, Wordpress, Joomla, etc. and then slowly everything gets paired down into what is generally agreed upon as the "correct" set of features, and they all just look a bit the same. And then of course you occasionally have a teenager who fits a great stereo to a Mazda or something, but by and large, everything is pretty much standardized. I know it's more efficient, but it's terribly boring.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. I'd argue that fewer people can do it now (relative to the Internet population) than previously, because free webspace is dead, the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it), ftp is dead, DMCA, GDPR, hackers are scary, HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design). The web is a playing field for larger corporations now and most people and small entities have given up and just maintain a FB/IG presence.
  - gsich 8y ago
    Desktop isn't dead, neither is (by extension) laptop.

jccalhoun 8y ago

I've been doing some research on videogaming in the 90s and I run across so many dead links to things that even archive.org doesn't have. The thing that is really frustrating is that there were a handful of psuedo-podcasts with interviews from game developers that are all gone because they were posted in real audio.

bshipp 8y ago
if you're finding stuff that's not on archive.org just append web.atchive.org/save/ in front of the url to get the crawler to capture it. I used to have a chrome and Firefox JavaScript bookmarklet to do it in one click but that doesn't work anymore.
- bshipp 8y ago
  oh, for the love of...two hours into work and I read this thread and there's a fat-fingered spelling error that I can't edit anymore. The url is obviously http://web.archive.org/save/https://<url-to-be-saved> http://web.archive.org/save/https://<url-to-be-saved>

blfr 8y ago

if I ever needed to show proof of my time there it would only be a Google search away On that topic, has anyone discovered why Google deep-six'd Usenet archives it acquired with Deja News? You used to be able to find specific posts from specific posters with by: and other operators. Sometime in the aughts it degraded quickly to the point where I can't find threads from which I have explicit excerpts and full author names. Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history? Did it just fall in disrepair?

Tepix 8y ago
There was no business model for Google with an open, decentralized Usenet. They tried to replace it with Google Groups and later Google Plus.
- blfr 8y ago
  It explains why they never had a good Usenet client but why is the content not really searchable anymore?
  - gdulli 8y ago
    I'd imagine that a body of content that's largely from the pre-ecommerce internet isn't of any use to Google.
- ckastner 8y ago
  I hated Google Groups, the interface seemed so overengineered compared to the simplicity of Usenet. I believe you couldn't even view the (plaintext) posts with Javascript disabled. I have a suspicion that Stack Overflow's success can be attributed at least somewhat to the experience that was browsing comp.lang.* using Google Groups.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    I haven't looked in a while, but for a long time, the single most-voted-for bug in Google's public bug tracker was "give me some API access to the message content in Google Groups." Ironically, there is already a very simple API mechanism that could have been used to provide exactly all the information people wanted... NNTP. All Google would have to do is provide an NNTP server endpoint to Google Groups (even beyond its Usenet mirror). It's not even that hard to write an NNTP server: it's probably the easiest server to implement of POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP.

Tepix 8y ago

The answer is clear: It takes an effort to publish something on the internet. Companies and other organisations disappear and their web presence disappears with them. It takes an extra effort to create a copy. The dark web - the parts of the web that aren't easily accessible because they consist of databases, paid access areas or perhaps simply facebook posts not published as "public" - remains hidden and inaccessible to preservation efforts. There's also the problem of consuming old internet content. Do you still have a gopher client? Will old web pages look the same in your browser as they did in 1995? Flash will no longer work (hooray?). On the other hand books, photographs and magazines stick around until you throw them away and we have public institutions that are dedicated to their preservation.

badsectoracula 8y ago
FWIW old web pages do look the same as they did in 1995, with the exception of the default background color changing from silver to white at some point for some reason. But, at least under Windows, the default fonts, colors, spacing, etc are 99% the same. Flash also works if you are using Chrome. Sadly, Firefox does not support Flash plugin anymore (and i say sadly because just yesterday i was trying to find some files from an old site that was made using Flash and i had to use Chrome just for that).
- icebraining 8y ago
  Firefox still supports Flash, it just doesn't bundle it, unlike Chrome - you have to install the plugin manually. They're only slowly deprecating it starting on FF 69 (the "always activate" option will disappear, so users will have to click to activate it every time: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434)
sebastiaand 8y ago
> Do you still have a gopher client? This is a big problem. Firefox dropped Gopher and Chrome never supported it. Most Gopher users, presumably, use a Gopher web proxy. For fun I recently built a Gopher web client, implementing the entire protocol in a single page app (literally a single HTML file, no frameworks or dependencies). It supports most documented file formats including "modern" extras like video and audio. Gopher client: - https://gopher.commons.host https://gopher.commons.host Source code: - https://gitlab.com/commonshost/gaufre https://gitlab.com/commonshost/gaufre

deleted 8y ago

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pard68 8y ago

I know of Eternal September, but is there much life left in Usenet other than for binary distribution?

sverige 8y ago
Not really, no.
icedchai 8y ago
Some obscure groups, like comp.os.vms, are actually quite active.

EamonnMR 8y ago

Whenever we get into web nostalgia I've got to post http://wiby.me http://wiby.me which is a search engine for live retro websites, a mix of modern sites with very little except text and immaculate sites from the early web that time hasn't changed.

Kiro 8y ago

I used to be involved in multiple popular things on the internet and became quite famous, even having my own "fan club". All of that is gone. Googling my old nick name yields 0 results.

0898 8y ago
Care to share more?
sneakernets 8y ago
Same here. In the late 90's I was involved with some other kids from college creating and maintaining a site called "The Crazy Zone", where I designed some of the first JavaScript games ever made (as far as I know), including a crude breakout clone and a magic 8-Ball. We even had a chatroom applet made in Java! But it's just gone now. Can't find a trace of it.
tsumnia 8y ago
While not famous myself, I do get a single page of memory lane [1] about the AOL communities (plural) around the SNES game Earthbound. It isn't much, and a VERY BAD EYE SORE, but thinking back about all the stuff I said / posted / got TOS'd... I think I'm fine with that getting lost to the Aether. [1] http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/archive.html http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/archive.html

return0 8y ago

Often it's the domain renewal issue. People won't keep paying the domain for an irrelevant website, even if the hosting itself is free. OTOH, why would we want to keep everything that was ever written on the internet, forgetting is a natural process in culture.

gugagore 8y ago
I think there's a lot of sadness around forgetting. I'd like to preserve almost all of it, really. That's why we have stories, and care about legacy. All to avoid forgetting and being forgotten.
- jopsen 8y ago
  Put static HTML on GitHub pages and it'll probably stay up forever.. Well, at the time scale of forever, it's always sketchy, but the odds are decent.

deleted 8y ago

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Merrill 8y ago

One of the brain's most important abilities to maintain sanity is the ability to forget the unimportant and remember the important. The internet will need that ability as it becomes more intelligent. Having AI reasoning based on vast pools of fake news and other disinformation would not be a good thing.

newaccoutnas 8y ago

For some nostaligia, poke around http://www.webring.org/ http://www.webring.org/

gambler 8y ago

The web has nothing built-in for archiving and versioning. It's a gaping hole in this technological platform, one that has been noted and criticized for a very long time. The reality of this problem, however, is vehemently denied by the current generation of "technologists". Of course, those are the same people who get six-digit salaries for managing complexity they themselves create - partly through hyper-centralization. Good and resilient archival, on the other hand, necessarily implies some level of decentralization. I singlehandedly maintain a 14-year-old website that used to be a modestly popular web magazine. It's not very expensive, but it's a pain. DNS system is horrible and it's easy to loose domain names to some nonsense. (I lost one that used to be a free 2nd level domain when it was converted to a paid-for zone. Not a matter of money, just paperwork.) Server management is a time drain. Stuff like adding SSL certificate to a legacy VPS can lead to a cascade of updates and config changes that can take days to make and test. BTW, everyone sings praises to archive.org (and it's well-deserved), but most people here do not seem to realize that they are also a centralized platform that can collapse and take everything down with them. Who archives the archives, etc. Fortunately, they are not the only one of the sort. Unfortunately, it's all very ad-hoc. If W3C weren't a bunch of corporate shills, there would be a standard for creating versioned web archives, like, 10 years ago. It's obvious that we need one.

JasonFruit 8y ago
'Archival' is an adjective. The gerund 'Archiving' has done good service as a noun for decades. (I will die on this hill.)
- gambler 8y ago
  Fair enough. Updated.
bo1024 8y ago
Interesting post. So are you saying that if there was a good standard for versioned web archives, then you could stop maintaining your website and just point people to the archives?
- 8y ago

ChrisSD 8y ago

I looked into this awhile ago and came to a similar conclusion about the web. Here's the examples of pre 1996 websites I know of (some are recreations): * The famous first web page: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... * The Global Network Navigator: http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html * Trincoll Journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20010413164311/http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010413164311/http://www.trinco... * BBC Networking Club: https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301 https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301 Anything pre 1994 is very hard to find.

joegahona 8y ago
I could've sworn that the CyberBoxingZone went pre-1994, but the earliest I can find is '95: http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/aolnws.htm http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/aolnws.htm Great list you've got.
randobrando1285 8y ago
Can't forget spacejam: https://spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm https://spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Ha, that's great! Although it is 1996, which is much better archived then earlier years.
canada_dry 8y ago
Not that old (2005), but one of the earliest crowd funding projects on the net. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I just found out the guy who made that also made the kinda-famous "Calm" smartphone app!

eruci 8y ago

I got sued over copyright infringement a few years back, and most of the evidence against my company consisted of screenshots of my sites/blogs from the internet archive. It is a good research tool for "who came first".

drmsucks 8y ago

It's going to get even worse now that entertainment media is being "streamed" and DRM is preventing users from making copies. Today's game servers and loot boxes are very short lived, and they aren't even selling physical disks for people to preserve and enjoy.

linuxftw 8y ago
The solution to this problem is a simple one: Don't buy DRM content. It's just entertainment, you can live without it.

Lord_Zero 8y ago

Simply put: It is not free to keep stuff up on the internet forever.

lawrencegs 8y ago

And this is just web. Don’t forget that we also have Apps. Some of the newer startups / media company don’t / choose not to have a web interface. We have archive for web, but not for apps. I looked at the screenshot of the first Uber & Amazon app, and it was amazing how different they look compared to today (2019)

deleted 8y ago

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pcr910303 8y ago

Isn’t the distributed nature of web making this super hard? Everyone can buy a new domain, everyone can structure one’s website differently, everyone can stop publishing content in any date. Innovative ideas about distribution and structure pop out frequently and change how data is served. It’s different from usual publication where publishers are needed to publish content, structure has not changed since the B.C. era when books were invented, and data is physical. We started archiving publications long after they were invented; the web was made only 20 years ago. I’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense, and people will have to study web with ones that survived, just like how we study papyrus or the Rosetta’s stone.

0815test 8y ago
> It’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense That's actually easy - it's literally what blockchains are for. The whole issue is how to manage the tradeoff between reliably archiving everything (and expecting participants in the network to do the same, so that the system doesn't end up relying on a single point of failure), and delivering/serving the stuff efficiently.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- opportune 8y ago
  I don't think a long term, major content archival project is a good idea for a blockchain. Since the internet is so large, you would have to have major, major sharding (as opposed to the naive approach in bitcoin where all nodes contain the entire history). And additionally if you archive everything in an immutable datastore, you are going to end up archiving and then hosting illegal content, and afaik it is still not settled whether that constitutes a crime (in my opinion, it should).
- pcr910303 8y ago
  IIRC blockchains are for anonymized trust, not efficient archiving, right? I'm not sure if blockchains are going to become super useful when it comes to preserving the internet... :-(

jedberg 8y ago

"While digital storage has fallen drastically in price, archiving all this material still costs money. “Who’s going to pay for it?”" This is really interesting. If you think about it, for all of our print archives, the creator bore some of the cost of archiving it. When you print a book you have to send a copy to the library of congress, so the "storage" is paid for by the publisher. Same with newspaper archives -- usually the newspaper is sent by the publisher, who pays for the "storage" (the paper and ink). I think the UK and France and many other countries have similar systems. But in the digital age, the entire cost is carried by the archiver.

ohithereyou 8y ago
>When you print a book you have to send a copy to the library of congress As best I can tell, you only need to send two copies of a book to the Library of Congress if you want to get an LCCN. Otherwise, there's no requirement to do so, certainly not to receive copyright protection.
- jedberg 8y ago
  That's true, but basically every publisher does it because they want an LCCN. I suppose if you self publish you don't have to. But the bigger point is that to be in the archive you have to bear some of the cost.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Merrill 8y ago
The cost of printing and shipping the book is only part of the cost. There are additional costs as part of the initial storage, such as the administrative function of issuing the LCCN, cataloging, and shelving the book. Once shelved, the book continues to incur the cost of shelf space in a climate controlled building. The cost of just keeping a book in a library is great enough that all but the richest academic libraries have an ongoing process of identifying and selling or destroying books with no circulation over a period of time. Usually they do so after checking whether they can borrow a copy from another library in their network should one of their patrons ask for it.

edoo 8y ago

The best page in the universe is still up! http://maddox.xmission.com/ http://maddox.xmission.com/ Like it or not it is a historical monument.

roland35 8y ago

My favorite memories of the earlier internet was hijacking Yahoo chat rooms (guns and ammo was a favorite) and singing 80's karaoke while the normal denizens became increasingly irate. Because once you took control of the microphone you got to keep it as long as you held the button down ;) Now the internet does not seem as fun and wholesome as it did back in the 90's; I feel bad that my kids don't get to enjoy that. On the plus side, maybe they can make some side income as influencers?

agumonkey 8y ago

the process of wild growth fueling the need for organization which in turns causes sclerosis is .. as mundane as strange.

denysonique 8y ago

With the new Terrorist Content Regulation by EU there will be even less left of the internet we currently have today, here is a recent open letter from Vint Cerf, Jimmy Wales, Bruce Schneier, EFF regarding the matter. http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/TCO-letter-to-rapporteurs.pdf http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/TCO-letter...

djhworld 8y ago

In some ways the 'old' web died around 2006-2007 when Facebook started to get its hooks in. MySpace was a big thing before that, where people curated their own profiles with custom HTML, then Geocities before that. When Facbeook came along it felt like a breath of fresh air at the time as the interface was clean and simple, and all your pals were there. I guess it was one of those "you don't know what you've got til its gone" things, because the sterile Facebook UI and overly corporate Instagram fiefdoms makes me really miss the old internet. The thing is though, does anyone outside of tech or media really give that much of a crap? All their pals are on Facebook/Instagram, the barrier to entry is low (no need to learn HTML/CSS/JS)

ungzd 8y ago
Now Instagram users have to learn how to optimize posting time and how to cheat algofeed by adding unrelated hashtags and even tuning color scheme in photos. I regularly hear about such things from casual users with 50 subscribers, not SMM workers. It's much harder than knowing <b> and <img> tags. With heavy videoization of social media, they also have to learn video montage and lighting.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I'm not disagreeing with any of this. But I think there's additional perspective to be had. I see a lot of conversation about early Internet and the health of the Internet. I think some of this is just because those of us who remember it, are starting to ache over it a bit for all kinds of reasons, one of which is because that's what old people do. Today I got lunch with my 17 year old nephew. I asked him about what he does on the Internet and if he misses the "old Internet". First off, he has no context of what the old Internet is. He doesn't really care nor seem to feel like he's missing out. Second, he showed me what he mainly does. Basically it was a handful of group chats via Signal and WhatsApp, a whole bunch of web comic websites, and some YouTube series. I felt like a dad of a teenager for a fleeting moment and my generalized conclusion was that he's consuming a ton of independently developed creative content. I was actually pretty proud of what the Internet looks like for him. I asked him about curation and the ability to hold on to his favourites. How does he ensure that something he loves isn't gone in 10 years? This concept really didn't seem to matter to him. His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff. Made me wonder if attachment to nostalgia may be fleeting as well. Is this the full story? Of course not. But it made me feel a bit better about things and a bit more skeptical of the doomsaying I often hear and sometimes take part in.

ghaff 8y ago
Consider instead of YouTube though broadcast TV in the old days. If you were sitting in front of the TV at the right time, you could watch the latest episode of Star Trek. (OK. I'm dating myself. Work with me here.) You might have been aware that repeats would probably air on some unknown schedule some day. But, really, maybe you'd never be able to watch that particular show again.
- darksaints 8y ago
  And because of it, entire television writing styles have changed, morphing into strong season-long narratives instead of loosely related miniplots. Before, writers always had to take into account the fact that a viewer may not have seen the previous episode, or even any episodes at all. I much prefer what TV has become, to the point where I now prefer the medium over feature length films...something I never would have expected 20 years ago.

driverdan 8y ago

I'm still amazed that Internet Archive maintains copies of my first site from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19971222141333/http://stuff.simplenet.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19971222141333/http://stuff.simp... Many of the external links are archived too. Anyone else have links to share of their old, pre-2000 sites?

purplezooey 8y ago

That site is heavy on generic clip art photos.

Bud 8y ago

I find it sad that a post like this about the "early Internet" is really about websites. The web is, of course, not actually the "early Internet".

stesch 8y ago

Article is about the web. Clicked it because I thought it's about the early Internet.

BorisMelnik 8y ago

haven't logged in in a while, but more people should donate to archive.org - and I'm not speaking AT HN at all because statistically I'm sure HN contributes more than anyone but archive.org are truly the historians of the web and we need to support them.

Keyframe 8y ago

Time really did move fast, but it seems to have slowed down. "The early Internet" - by the end of 90's it seemed like Internet was all over the place and has been with us forever with large sites established their presence and we were on the verge of dotcom. All in all, it was only what, five or six good years (until 1999). All of THAT happened in that time span. Now, look at the last six years.

revskill 8y ago

It's about the database or where the content has gone ? It's not about the web.

nikisweeting 8y ago

I arrived a little late here, but for anyone just getting into web archiving, it's a fascinating space! We maintain a master community index with a list of all the major archiving organizations and open source tools here: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm... Some of the cooler projects apart from ArchiveBox.io: - https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb / webrecorder.io - https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet - https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb - https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io - https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler And many more blog posts, articles, projects, and organizations on the wiki!

dwd 8y ago

The Internet Archive is the closest I have to a resume of past projects. So many things I've worked on no longer exist (at least not in the same form) but can still be found there.

leoc 8y ago

Somewhat cheeky from the BBC, which has a record of permanently deleting large sections of its website much more recently than c. 1999.

nemoniac 8y ago

The title is misleading. The article is about the early Web, not the early Internet.

daggasoft 8y ago

Someone at the internet archive brought this thread to my attention. You all may be interested in checking out my project. http://theoldnet.com http://theoldnet.com The original purpose of this project was to allow vintage computers (old browsers) to surf the old net using the Internet Archive's WayBack API. But most people use it on modern computers. We just passed 100,000 pages served up yesterday. I've added a number of features to the site including a working guestbook and automatically bubbling of geocities pages to the homepage upon discovery. Two days ago I released the Old Net Navigator web browser. It's a little buggy but mostly feature complete. You can check that out here http://theoldnet.com/browser http://theoldnet.com/browser

xorand 8y ago

This lack of care is amazing. On one side there is a majority of people who react with oh, there's so much worthless stuff shared and consumed every day. On the other side there are people who realize that there is so much valuable information, which takes so little memory by today standards. Take for example Sci-Hub library of articles. It's only 70TB. Most of it is not stuff people share and like and consume like they do with Youtube or Instagram. Most of it is even old, because many recent scientific articles are available without passing through Sci-Hub. Only 70TB of valuable data, in a sea of crap. We might loose this any day. Which corporation cares about a tiny ammount of data? Or suppose you're a historian in 100 years from now. What you have as sources? Nothing? In the age where everything is posted on social media? Too bad, Google or Facebook or others like that decided to trash a huge quantity of data, most of it crap, to be sure, and a tiny quantity of unique, or hard to produce, or scientific, artistic data. Books which you can't read because MS drops a service? How many of the share-and-like people passed by the experience of writing a book?

armortech 8y ago

Spent last ~10 years to actively search each other week a small game I liked as a kid. It was on those CDs you buy with PC magazines. Even got in touch with the original author who, of course, lost it too. Found it a month ago. Can you imagine the happiness?