9 ms·
Ask HN: What was your favorite website from the 1990s?
I'm too young to remember any specific website, but I'd like to know about your old internet habits, webrings and such. I wonder how many of them are still active.
- gjvc 6y agoaltavista.com was the one that made you feel like you could find anything. altervista had cracks for windows shareware.
- petecooper 6y agoSmall world. It was you that told me about bash.org!
- geoah 6y agoI recall astalavista.box.sk for cracks etc, but don't think I've heard altervista. do you happen to remember the full domain? would be interested to see if there is a web archive of it.
- gjvc 6y agoI may well be misremembering, and astalavista.box.sk was the one, actually.
- neom 6y agoOh yeah I forgot about altervista, altervista as fucking awesome. I think I downloaded sub7 from it.
- Wingman4l7 6y agoWithout question, Bill Beaty's http://amasci.com/ http://amasci.com/ -- still up and running after all these years!! Had a huge impact on me; it encouraged science exploration, investigation, skepticism, curiosity, and hands-on experimentation.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoYahoo's curated, hierarchical directory of web pages.
- LinuxBender 6y agogeocities.com, which has since been replaced by neocities.org [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- geoah 6y agogeocities, tripod, angelfire were all great. geocities' taxonomies where amazing to both find and get your content found. so many x-files fan pages under area51.
- jimmyvalmer 6y agocdnow.com, playboy.com, my.yahoo.com
- mrspeaker 6y agoI spent so many hours on "Fravia's pages of reverse engineering" and "Fravia's search lore" (mirror here, original is gone: http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/index.html http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/index.html) A cavernous den of practical info, and mystery! I was sad to hear that Fravia passed away - they were such an inspiration to a kid learning about computers.
- samizdis 6y agoAfter altavista.com, it would have to be Urban75, which is still online (but sort of mostly mothballed; mostly a museum now): http://urban75.com/ http://urban75.com/ Edited to add parenthesis, now that I have flicked through it a bit.
- marsvin 6y agoAstalavista and other "sibling" sites on its parent domain were my favorites. I used to be a silly borderline criminal kid.
- geoah 6y agothe whole box.sk community was great :D
- xenihn 6y agogoatse (nws if you end up googling it)
- petecooper 6y agoVery NSFW, for anyone not aware.
- evolve2k 6y agoSomeone bought the domain when it expired and ran a crowdfunding.. “A pioneering shock site has now been repurposed to provide amusing e-mail addresses for anyone willing to cough up $50 for an Indiegogo project.” https://www.cnet.com/news/grab-your-own-goatse-e-mail-address-for-shock-value/ https://www.cnet.com/news/grab-your-own-goatse-e-mail-addres...
- jessehattabaugh 6y agoHamsterdance
- procrastitron 6y agoSlashdot and Fark were good and still exist
- beamatronic 6y agoI went from Fark to Digg to Reddit
- orhmeh09 6y agoTextfiles HappyHacker
- beamatronic 6y agoMake James Earl Jones Speak Find the Pope in the Porsche sidewalk.com
- r34 6y agoAll kinds of abandonware sites. I used to download games and record them on CDs in internet cafés, even before I had my first computer:)
- kjs3 6y agoOld Man Murray
- erik_seaberg 6y agoI still send people the Crate Review System: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html > Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.
- busterarm 6y agoVampire Radio
- raylus 6y agoJNCO jeans website, Angelfire sites, Homestar runner (‘99) to name a few.
- kkaranth 6y agocartoonnetwork.com There were a lot of fun Flash(Shockwave, as it was called back then) games!
- ttul 6y agozombo.com
- fartcannon 6y agoYou can do any thing.
- cbanek 6y agohappypuppy.com (happy puppy games). Used to have all sorts of shareware in the 90s, and free demos. Sadly gone now apparently, but here's a reddit thread discussing it 10 years ago about how someone hadn't thought about it for 10 years previous to then! https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/at1ux/anyone_remember_happypuppycom_back_in_the_90s_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/at1ux/anyone_rememb...
- neom 6y agoAlbino Blacksheep, slashdot, and of course the amazing Homestar Runner!
- petecooper 6y agohttp://bash.org/ http://bash.org/ (It may be early 2000s.) I really miss IRC.
- neom 6y agoDo you have a fav log? This was me: http://bash.org/?78661 http://bash.org/?78661 heh.
- petecooper 6y agoBloodninja made me smile with their absurdity: http://bash.org/?search=Bloodninja&sort=0&show=25 http://bash.org/?search=Bloodninja&sort=0&show=25
- taneq 6y agoI spent so many hours on bash.org. And then it had a bit of a resurgence during the early smartphone era when I had mobile internet access but only a few megabytes of network quota - browsing http://bash.org/?random1 http://bash.org/?random1 was maybe the highest entertainment per kilobyte around.
- petecooper 6y ago>maybe the highest entertainment per kilobyte around. Superb.
- whatgoodisaroad 6y agoGrowing up I would read NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) which is still running! https://apod.nasa.gov/ https://apod.nasa.gov/
- rawland 6y agohttps://spacejam.com/ https://spacejam.com/
- hlandau 6y agoEverything2.com. Yes, it's still around, yet I've always found that the really interesting, amusing posts are from circa 2000, so that would appear to be its golden age. I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link. What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique. The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
- sxp 6y agoThis was a great online encyclopedia before Wikipedia was created.
- irrational 6y ago*Slashdot*. I spent so much time on there.
- superkuh 6y agoBill Beaty's "SCIENCE HOBBYIST" site, http://amasci.com/ http://amasci.com/ I really learned a lot there as a kid and I still reference and link it to others today.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoslashdot.org (before it went completely downhill with synthetic, commercial stories much like reddit is today, or at least the top subreddits) dejanews.com (before it was bought/killed by Google and when Usenet used to carry interesting discussions; interestingly, Usenet seems to occasionally have new good content in recent years after spammers and whackos have left)
- Meic 6y agohalfbakery.com - and it's still (half) going.
- Stevvo 6y agoNewgrounds, Gamefaqs. Both are still around, but my interests have changed since I was a child, so have not visited either for at-least 15 years.
- pramodliv1 6y agoFunTrivia - https://www.funtrivia.com/ https://www.funtrivia.com/ I spent a lot of time on it in the 2000s and later found that it was started in 1995 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FunTrivia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FunTrivia
- dasil003 6y agohttps://ozones.com/ https://ozones.com/
- wastholm 6y agoIf I have to pick just one, Hothothot.com! It was the first live e-commerce site I ever saw, the first site that accepted credit card payments, and the first (other than perhaps some technical demo site) that used HTTPS. It also had a very distinctive graphical design, and, of course, an amazing assortment of hot sauce with funny names like Dave's Insanity Sauce and Bat Out of Hell. I'm pretty sure I originally found it via Cool Site of the Day, which back then was the first page I went to every morning. Earliest capture I could find (warning: popups): https://web.archive.org/web/19990830033735/http://www.hothothot.com/hhh/cgi/newssince.cgi?0 https://web.archive.org/web/19990830033735/http://www.hothot...
- notadev 6y agoDogpile.com Lenshell.com
- grzm 6y agozeldman.com, alistapart.com. Oh, those heady standards-seeking days!
- tannhaeuser 6y agoalistapart.com, smashingmagazine.com, css-tricks.com and a couple other web "avantgarde" sites with a progressive vibe and focus on developing the web as an innovative and inclusive medium are still alive (though alistapart's hp marks half-year old stories with "new" badges which they probably shouldn't). Come to think about it, I spent a lot of time on w3c.org, OASIS xml-dev mailing list archives, and other web standardization sites.
- grzm 6y agoYeah, Zeldman and co are still around, and you’re right that they’re not quite what they used to be. Perhaps they’re just grown up? Kinda crazy: it was exciting to think back then that these people were making careers of this web stuff! And there’s a seeming contradiction I feel when I think now that they’re so polished and professional that I think maybe they’ve lost something. Probably it’s just that the novelty has worn off and I’m not following that particular space as closely. That’s more me than them, I suspect. And meyerweb.com, diveintomark, joeclark.org. When we were introduced to xml and xslt, and don’t forget xsl-fo; and css was the new kid on the block, and xhtml just a glimmer, and you still heard mention of sgml and DSSSL and the difference between valid and well-formed :) And a couple of flavors of RSS (didn’t find myself on Winer’s scripting.com that much, though), oh, and now there’s Atom! Which reminds me of Sam Ruby’s intertwingly.net. I’m waxing a bit nostalgic, I fear.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoI'd say, subjectively, those sites got a spike out of the "mobile web revolution" starting when Safari on iPhones hit the scene around 2009 until maybe 2015 or so, but then struggled with ad network consolidation and targeted advertising (DoubleClick was bought by Google in 2007), and regular ad prices going down (marked by eg Dr Dobbs Journal ceasing publishing in 2014). We really should put up a web museum. For me, the best of times were in early 2000s after the dot-com bubble with clean sites and web design coming of it's own with Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Google (back then).
- xnx 6y agohttp://www.zombo.com/ http://www.zombo.com/ also https://www.bluesnews.com https://www.bluesnews.com, which I am astounded still looks about the same.
- bearerofgarbage 6y agowww.google.com but it's changed since then
- sunstone 6y agoI second this. Google was such a huge step ahead of the yahoo and altavista's of the day that using it just one time was typically enough to convert the user. A real breath of fresh air.
- cameldrv 6y agoWord.com. It was sort of a postmodern literary magazine. So many funny, interesting and weird stories were on there. One of the columns called Work got compiled into a book called Gig, but the rest of the site is lost to history.
- tremendo 6y agoMemepool was my favorite source for interesting or fun links to follow. For "more intelligent" links (related to Web dev. IA, programming, etc) I frequented Tomalak's Realm. I see several mentions of Slashdot, Kuro5hin was a descendant from it that also got traction. Edit to add K10K which was design inspiration.
- ricc 6y agoyahoo.com I was a child back in the 90s and growing up in a lower middle class family in a developing country, we didn’t have the luxury of a consistently good internet connection. But whenever I have the chance to connect, Yahoo was perfect for me because you can see everything in one page, specifically the top international headlines + the search bar. In the early 2000s, I’d say my favorite is stumbleupon.com.
- pan69 6y agoflipcode.com was the first website I would visit on a daily basis.
- etcet 6y agotextfiles.com. I was born too late to get into BBS's but I was just the right age to read Jolly Roger's Cookbook (http://textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/ http://textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/).
- systemsdude 6y agosuck.com "A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun." So snark, such wow. Not online any more but it's on the wayback machine. One example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160529162915/http://www.suck.com/daily/1995/11/08/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160529162915/http://www.suck.c...
- kcartlidge 6y agoDMOZ - the Open Directory Project. It stopped in 2017 (I think) but there is an archive at https://dmoz-odp.org/ https://dmoz-odp.org/ which is frozen content but otherwise working.