13 ms·
Welcome to the Old Internet Again
- capSAR 7y agoThis is one rabbit hole I don't mind falling in. So many links and pages to poke around in!
- ecolonsmak 7y agocisco umbrella does not like this site.
- Analemma_ 7y agoNeither does my workplace filtering; it's saying it's malware.
- whymauri 7y agosame here
- TecoAndJix 7y agoWhat classification are you seeing? Thought maybe the “new domain” blacklist they have but looks like the site has been alive since at least January
- JoshTriplett 7y agoMITM boxes like that don't like sites that act as proxies. They also block things like browserling because they can act as a browser of other sites.
- VyseofArcadia 7y ago> We're sorry but theoldnet-browser doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. This doesn't look much like the old internet to me...
- cameronbrown 7y agoThere's a noscript version here: http://theoldnet.com/navbar?url=w3c.org&decode=false&noscripts=true http://theoldnet.com/navbar?url=w3c.org&decode=false&noscrip...
- nydel 7y agoneither the main nor noscript version seem to work from a text browser e.g. lynx. edit: works with links browser for me. very cool!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jancsika 7y agoI never understood realism in painting for this very reason. The frame around the painting makes it impossible to accept the painting as the thing it's pretending to be.
- fwip 7y ago"Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
- bleep-bloop 7y agoI never understood realism in photography for this very reason. The paper upon which the photograph resides makes it impossible to accept the photo as the thing it's pretending to be.
- Veen 7y agoYou could make the same point for cameras and the human visual system. Neither accurately depict what's really there. Plus, realist art isn't pretending to be what's really there, with the possible exception of trompe l'oeil. It's a representation in paint, a mimicry created for various purposes, none of which is to make you think you're standing in front of the thing being depicted.
- jmkd 7y agoLovely use of Netscape Navigator UI
- siekmanj 7y ago> theoldnet.com is currently unable to handle this request. Not sure if intentional or hilarious irony.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoChanging sites didn't work for me in Firefox 67.0.3
- djsumdog 7y agoWeird. Changing sites worked for me and I'm on that exact version (Linux/Gentoo). Occasionally I'd get an error, but it'd go away if I go back and try it again.
- PDFormat 7y agoNone of the functionality seems to be working for me in Chrome 75, Windows 10
- davesmith1983 7y agoJokes aside I recently setup a phpBB forum and me and friends are using IRC instead of discord. IRC is ridiculously fast and so is phpBB.
- errantspark 7y agoWhat's made you migrate away from discord? I grew up on phpBB and IRC, but I've been using discord almost exclusively for all my social media needs. The seamless integration across desktop/mobile, the quick switcher, easy filesharing and the powerful search functionality seem like killer differentiators vs the oldschool way.
- wildleaf 7y agoIMO voice chat in discord is unreliable. The rest is great barring privacy concerns. I'd like to go back to mumble but my group's inertia is too strong.
- xboxnolifes 7y agoAgree. I still use teamspeak as the primary voice chat with my main friend group. I use Discord for centralized access to different text channel groups.
- errantspark 7y agoWhat sort of issues are you guys encountering? I use the voicechat constantly and I haven't found it to be problematic.
- A2017U1 7y agoI use both discord and mumble regularly, mumble is consistently better and it's run on a tiny vps that's doing other reasonably demanding cpu and network tasks at the same time. Discord can go from great to terrible pretty quickly and the extra latency fluctuates a bit. ymmv.
- kodz4 7y agoEvery time phones, OSes and websites update, I watch my parents struggling to deal with all the UI changes and I keep thinking I am going to be there one day. Maybe this is the solution to all the unending changes. In Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, there is an old man who wakes up in the future and is struggling to use the latest interfaces. So the comp just overlays the old Windows 95(?) interface that he is happy and familiar with.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoAt least Windows 95 had colorful icons, labels, and tooltips on everything. Black on gray dialog boxes didn't blind you, and it had sufficient contrast to be readable (unlike every designer's website that uses microscopic gray text on barely different gray). On the flip side, about 8-ish years ago, I installed Xubuntu on my parent's PC, replacing XP. I told them here's Thunderbird, Firefox, Solitare, and how to shut down. Once I said that it worked like Windows (i.e. the X in the corner closes things), they didn't have any problems. I anticipated having to move them back to Windows, but didn't need to.
- collyw 7y agoDesign trends seems to be getting less and less useful in favor of looking pretty. It took me around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it actually clicked that it was a "standard" icon for a menu. Now that icon seems to be getting replaced to three dots for a menu. Why?
- Crinus 7y agoAnd pretty is subjective, i find the Win9x, Win2K, OS/2 (...to some extent), BeOS, and KDE1 icons better looking than the more recent ones which are usually monochromatic. The Win9x icons tried to be colorful but also were limited by a 4bit palette, which meant that they were both high contrast and had bright colors. Win2K icons are a softer version of those and KDE1 icons are what you'd probably get if you tried to make icons in the style of Win9x/OS/2 but without the technical limitations. I was never a fan of WinXP and Vista/7 icons, too plasticky, often faded out and shiny. I did like macOS icons before they decided to get rid of skeuomorphism and made everything like it was designed by a 5 year old with a vector application. They were high quality but also had high readability. As a developer i hated them though because they were very hard to make something decent. I also like the GNOME 2/Tango style and the elementaryOS style which seems to me to be based on Tango. Tango is a bit WinXP-ish but i think they did a better job with making the icons less plasticky and more readable. But my favorite is the Win9x and KDE1 styles because of both how they look and how easy (relatively speaking) is to make them (which is important, otherwise it is hard to get a consistent look).
- boyadjian 7y agoESET NOD 32 does not like this site. Sorry.
- juststeve 7y agomalware
- pmarreck 7y agofalse positive is a thing
- daggasoft 7y agoyes I have been struggling to get theoldnet exempt from phishing detection sites. There is nothing phishy about it but I can understand how their detection methods would trigger a false positive. If anyone can help me with this please reach out to me using the contact information on theoldnet.com
- kiliancs 7y agoThis comment might be referring to Trend Micro reporting links on this site as malware: > Warning! The website contains malware. Visiting this site may harm your computer > Fraudulent sites that mimic legitimate sites to gather sensitive information, such as usernames and passwords.
- juststeve 7y agoESET Nod32 said it was malware, but second try said it was fine :/
- svdr 7y agoRemember to set your browser window size to 640x480!
- aussiegeek 7y agoHow can the under construction image at the bottom of the page not be a gif?
- css 7y agoCisco Umbrella has this listed as security threat, FYI
- zwaps 7y agoSo does ESET. Blocks this site.
- keanebean86 7y agoThe guestbook is vulnerable to XSS so it probably has a lot of other issues.
- dddddaviddddd 7y agoMaybe also because it's essentially a proxy (to the IA)?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- djsumdog 7y agoIt's not in the list, but you can put windows95.com into the address bar. Man that's some crazy nostalgia. I wonder if it pulls from archive.com or some other old index/cache. I remember that era of mIRC and eggdrop bots and fservs and Hotline clients and NNTP servers and RealMedia encodes of Transformers Beast Machines from Canada (which came out months before they did in the US and we'd leave our dialup on all night to download them and then play them through a CRT so they didn't look like trash). A time when if you didn't find something on Lycos, you'd go to Yahoo and Hotbot and Dogpile and different search engines gave you different results. It was a different era.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> I wonder if it pulls from archive.com It proxies the initial html request and then you'll notice any assets on the page load directly through archive.org.
- Sendotsh 7y agoI’m sure it’s just the age I’ve hit, but I have been overwhelmingly nostalgic for those days lately. The internet was FUN, while still being ridiculously useful and efficient. The information of the entire planet was at our fingertips and available instantly (well, at ~2Kb/s). The web was minimal and slick and information-dense. Content owned the day, whether it was super-active IRC channels or news groups or websites with a 728x90 banner at the top and the rest was content (most of which fit “above the fold”!). Now.. holy shit the web is a mess.
- ksaj 7y agoWe didn't have search engines in the earliest days, but we still found what we needed rather quickly. Gopher was pretty slick. I still have occasion to use it. IMO gopher is better than even the current web for certain things. Remember before search engines, there were this lists, sure, but more interesting were the Web Rings. (Yea, even that far back, everything about hypertext was one mixed metaphor after another.) Now I'm wondering if the archie (and veronica) search engines that had their brief moment are still operational. So much info with so little overhead and spam!
- pnathan 7y agoif you just use html 4, minimal css, and no js, you'll get a good old internet experience. :)
- petercooper 7y agoSo how is this working? I'm seeing traces of Wayback Archive here and there, but it seems so much faster than when I ever use it directly.. Edit: Ah, if you go to the very bottom of the page, it explains the situation: "It is a dumb, pass-through proxy. If the content exists in the Internet Archive, and the content is requested by the end user, theoldnet will blindly pass the search result from the Internet Archive to the end user."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fopen64 7y agoActually a bandwidth limited secondary Internet that would work on low band media like ham, LoRa etc. Will be a thing one day, like 8-bit games are resurrected every new platform or forms factor.
- woodgrainz 7y agoCouple of other sites that allow you to get your nostalgic internet fix: https://www.versionmuseum.com/ https://www.versionmuseum.com/ https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/ https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
- JoblessWonder 7y agoWow. That "BIG SIMPSONS-PAGE" brings back memories. It looks almost exactly like the first website I built on AOL's free web hosting (hometown). The nostalgia is hitting me hard.
- miguelmota 7y agoThe good old days when JavaScript wasn't used for janky animations
- joeldg 7y agomalware block on that page…
- giaour 7y ago"The website you are trying to access has been identified as a security risk; access has been disallowed by [corporate information security team]"
- bscphil 7y agoWould be nice if the link was changed to http://theoldnet.com/ http://theoldnet.com/ which shows the home page and works without Javascript. Otherwise you get the impression that this site is just a proxy for archive.org. The home page is much more informative.
- dang 7y agoOk, changed from http://theoldnet.com/browser/ http://theoldnet.com/browser/. Not sure I understand the difference.
- gtirloni 7y agoI remember the time when storage providers were fighting for the title of who had the most capacity. I think xoom.com started offering 1GB at some point and that was unthinkable. Good times.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI guess AngelFire had a core user group of Medical Transcriptionists. Here's their predictions for the future from 1996: http://theoldnet.com/get?decode=true&noscripts=true&year=1996&url=http://angelfire.com/mt2/next.html http://theoldnet.com/get?decode=true&noscripts=true&year=199... Lots of talk about speech-to-text. Dragon doesn't seem to be 100% there yet today in my observations.
- libraryatnight 7y agoThe old battle.net takes me back. Love the links to topaz chat and winter's bot. I think I spent as much time on channel wars with "enemy" clans on bnet as I did playing actual games.
- sgentle 7y agoIf you want to get off at every stop on the nostalgia train, Slashdot keeps a story archive going back to 1998: https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=bytime&keyword=&year=1998 https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=bytime&keyword=&year=1998 Stand-out titles include: "Nintendo-64 or PlayStation? Which to buy for XMas?" "NGLayout now called Gecko to be released this week" "Microsoft blows it again with Windows 2000 name" "George Lucas Talks about new Star Wars movie" "Debian 2.0 Beta IRC Party Tonight" "PDA Overview: Pilot Still King"
- runn1ng 7y ago“Linux Desktop is DOA?” (December 30, 1998) Well not that much changed. (The submission comment talks how 1999 will be the year of the Linux desktop.)
- patsplat 7y agoReading this on an Android phone... Some might argue it's an abuse of open source but it is Linux nonetheless.
- TheRealDunkirk 7y agoIt was. RedHat with Ximian Desktop and Crossover Office was peak desktop Linux.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt was peak desktop, not peak desktop Linux, and the bulk of the smartphones that took the place of those desktops do in fact run Linux.
- kragen 7y agoLast year, to pick an arbitrary time period, it looks like manufacturers sold about 260 million computers running Microsoft operating systems, about 1.1 billion computers running Linux, and about 280 million computers running iOS, not counting embedded processors and servers that don't have their own displays. So your comment is correct, but only in the trivial sense that the UI on most computers has abandoned the "desktop" metaphor. A much bigger issue is that now people have much less freedom on all of these platforms, in much the way I wrote about in this essay in 1999: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kragen-software.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kragen-software.html
- InTheArena 7y agoMissing Midwinter's Lurker's guide to Babylon 5...
- fsiefken 7y agoO yes, that was one of my goto's as well
- reidrac 7y agoThis is not how I remember it. Default background colour in Netscape Navigator was not white but #c0c0c0 (and IIRC it wast that colour in Mosaic too). And yes, lots of pages relied on the default. For example, this post has some screenshots: https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/whats-changed-in-the-past-17-years/ https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/whats-changed-in-the-past-17-...
- Aromasin 7y agoClicked the geocities.com link and got a "High Risk Website Blocked - Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website" notification from Sophos. False flag, or malicious?
- louhike 7y agoI had the same alert.
- Blaiz0r 7y agoI think it's to do with the way the Wayback machine API is used and the site altering the code of the webpage (removing incompatible JS and stitching together links). If you're on a coorporate network or have some kind of security firewall setup this could be flagged as a tampered URL.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoI have my 486 online running IE under Windows 3.1, now I actually have some sites I can demo on it when people ask me about it! Definitely bookmarking this one.
- work_is_play 7y agoYeah, back when websites loaded immediately and all at once.
- krapp 7y agoActually, websites tend to load much faster now than they used to, because "back when," we were using 28k dialup connections, and you would sometimes have to watch a site load a piece at a time. And heaven help you if there were images in the stream, those would probably break.
- daggasoft 7y agoHey everyone this site is my project. It’s a constant struggle getting taken off the spam blacklists because showing old versions of some sites counts as phishing I guess. Someone mentioned XSS in the guestbook. I’m not sure what they mean by that. The site should be handling this. Please report things like this on the issue tracker which is linked on the site. Thanks and I’m glad everyone is enjoying it!
- godshatter 7y agoWhat I'd like to see is a filter that parsed the hmtl, threw out most of it, and showed just the actual content in a minimalist fashion as an old website would. If I could run specific links through this filter from the right-click menu, for example, that would be awesome. Preferably with no need for javascript once I got there. Does anyone know of something like this? Just throw out all the modern UI crap and the ad crap and just give me the content. Putting some urls in the text box made me remember this.
- brookhaven_dude 7y agoReader view in safari and firefox
- godshatter 7y agoInteresting. I usually use Pale Moon. I don't know if it has a reader mode or not. I got on firefox, clicked around for a while, and didn't find any pages that let me trigger it. I did find an extension that lets you try it on any web page, but it doesn't work on all of them. Anyway, better than nothing. Thank you.
- adrianmonk 7y agoAnyone remember Luke Young's Talking Burrito? It was a goofy little "choose your own adventure" style story that a college student threw together about a talking burrito and aliens and stuff. (And I think that's the right name.) The choices were made by clicking hyperlinks. Hypertext is so normal now that it's hard to relate, but at the time it was fun to see the transformation from book format to hypertext. It was just such a natural fit.
- bjnord 7y agoUsenet as it was 30 years ago: http://olduse.net/ http://olduse.net/