3 ms·

Man I miss the old internet. It was a wild adventure around every corner with a huge diversity of tech and self hosted everything.

marban 4y ago
I miss cgi-bin urls after form submission.
freitzkriesler2 4y ago
I miss it too. We've lost so much. Anytime I find a self hosted web page with very basic html, I get excited. I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. The thinking being, if it ain't broke don't fix it. God bless Japan.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. Examples?
  - selcuka 4y ago
    See https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe... It is amazing that almost 10 years have passed since this article, but the example web sites are still more or less the same.
- erulabs 4y ago
  Can I ask why you put “self hosted” and “web 1.0 design together” so tightly? I self host a blog, and several apps, which are modern and full of JavaScript. I guess I’m not disagreeing - I also miss Web 1.0 - but combining the two seems like throwing the baby with the bath water. Can we have self hosted AND modern?
  - helpfulclippy 4y ago
    I can't speak for the person you reply to, but for me, I get a certain easy, comfortable feeling when I see something that looks like a GOOD basic 90s site. I don't mean the stereotypical spinning GIFs and whatever -- but if I see thoughtfully-presented content using nothing more than the default font, blue links (purple if I cliked it!), maybe some <hr> tags to help with organization a bit, and I see "Last Updated: 2023-xx-xx", I feel like I'm in very good company. (but I do appreciate some effort to constrain the page margins. :) )
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Textured background optional... Andrew Odlyzko's website is much in this style: <https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> Hal Varian's UC Berkeley pages as well: <https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.h...> Both of those are highly info-dense to boot, and load near-instantly.
eddieroger 4y ago
Same. I'm sitting here nostalgic for the days when I'd stay up late on my parents' computer talking to God knows who on AOL, reading about black boxes and phreaking in very vanilla sources, and learning how to write progs in VB back in the day. Oh the excitement when I got in the Winsock beta and now my whole OS had Internet connectivity. It was great times.
- marpstar 4y ago
  VB progz are literally at the root of the origin story behind I'm even here, now, writing this comment on this website. Seriously changed my life by compelling me to find an answer to the question "how did they build this?", which led me to coding. 25 years later and here I am.
  - marzell 4y ago
    Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.
    - mostlysimilar 4y ago
      > AOHell Early gateway drug for me too.
  - dclowd9901 4y ago
    > “how did they build this?” I feel like this is the absolute distilled essence of this site and its visitors.
  - qup 4y ago
    There's dozens of us! Here's an old thread some of you guys might have missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916
  - artificial 4y ago
    Dan Applemans guide to the Win32 API and some bas files really kickstarted things. {S /con/con. I think I’ve still got ancient copies around here. Time to browse lenshellprogarchive.com.
eclipxe 4y ago
But hey, at least we have a great JavaScript ecosystem now, right guys? Right? Sigh. I too miss the good old days.
pengaru 4y ago
While I too miss the old internet, more the pre-AOL-participating internet. It's been steadily downhill ever since, and worth noting that it's now so awful even the late 90s/early 2000s look like utopia in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
p-e-w 4y ago
I miss the content of the old Internet, but I do not miss its tech. Web design in general was garbage. Not just the good kind of garbage, with funky animations and weird colors, but horrible typography, unreadable fonts, zero accessibility, horizontal scrollbars everywhere, images used as text, misaligned tables, no math typesetting, no videos, and no interactive content without installing more garbage like Flash, ActiveX, or Java. When writing server-side stuff, your options were basically Perl/CGI, and later PHP, both of which are insecure trash that makes today's JavaScript look sane by comparison. The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Perl's Taint mode made it more secure than most languages, including today's. Other languages later ran into the same security bugs that had been fixed in Perl a decade before.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. Perl's got a very simplistic view of a tainted value with no context of usage. An untainted value will be fine for example for embedding in html, but not for SQL queries, paths, mongo queries, json strings, shell downs, etc. The protection/checks you get from it are really minimal in practice in comparison to Sonar and similar analysers. Ruby also had tainted values and dropped them recently https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16131 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16131
    - eduction 4y ago
      The simplicity is what I liked about taint mode - it didn’t purport to make anything safe for any particular context, you had to do that yourself. It just tracked strings that came in from outside Perl to make sure they didn’t get sent outside Perl again without being run through a regex. My main critique is that you don’t always want to use a regex to check safety, sometimes you want to try properly parsing a value before handing it off to another system. So in various places I’d end up untainting with a dot star regex.
pabs3 4y ago
Much of the old internet is still there, just outside the walled gardens of the modern internet.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  A good place to view them is r/forgottenwebsites on Reddit, sort by top of all time. Choose one and then follow the links on those pages to other websites and "surf." Its a fun pasttime. edit it seems that Angelfire is still live, so you can view sites made on that
  - denvermullets 4y ago
    that was a fun rabbit hole, thanks haha.
throwaway742 4y ago
You and me too sibling. We really lost something.

marban 4y ago

I miss cgi-bin urls after form submission.

freitzkriesler2 4y ago

I miss it too. We've lost so much. Anytime I find a self hosted web page with very basic html, I get excited. I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. The thinking being, if it ain't broke don't fix it. God bless Japan.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. Examples?
- selcuka 4y ago
  See https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe... It is amazing that almost 10 years have passed since this article, but the example web sites are still more or less the same.
erulabs 4y ago
Can I ask why you put “self hosted” and “web 1.0 design together” so tightly? I self host a blog, and several apps, which are modern and full of JavaScript. I guess I’m not disagreeing - I also miss Web 1.0 - but combining the two seems like throwing the baby with the bath water. Can we have self hosted AND modern?
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
  I can't speak for the person you reply to, but for me, I get a certain easy, comfortable feeling when I see something that looks like a GOOD basic 90s site. I don't mean the stereotypical spinning GIFs and whatever -- but if I see thoughtfully-presented content using nothing more than the default font, blue links (purple if I cliked it!), maybe some <hr> tags to help with organization a bit, and I see "Last Updated: 2023-xx-xx", I feel like I'm in very good company. (but I do appreciate some effort to constrain the page margins. :) )
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Textured background optional... Andrew Odlyzko's website is much in this style: <https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/> Hal Varian's UC Berkeley pages as well: <https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.h...> Both of those are highly info-dense to boot, and load near-instantly.

eddieroger 4y ago

Same. I'm sitting here nostalgic for the days when I'd stay up late on my parents' computer talking to God knows who on AOL, reading about black boxes and phreaking in very vanilla sources, and learning how to write progs in VB back in the day. Oh the excitement when I got in the Winsock beta and now my whole OS had Internet connectivity. It was great times.

marpstar 4y ago
VB progz are literally at the root of the origin story behind I'm even here, now, writing this comment on this website. Seriously changed my life by compelling me to find an answer to the question "how did they build this?", which led me to coding. 25 years later and here I am.
- marzell 4y ago
  Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    > AOHell Early gateway drug for me too.
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  > “how did they build this?” I feel like this is the absolute distilled essence of this site and its visitors.
- qup 4y ago
  There's dozens of us! Here's an old thread some of you guys might have missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916
- artificial 4y ago
  Dan Applemans guide to the Win32 API and some bas files really kickstarted things. {S /con/con. I think I’ve still got ancient copies around here. Time to browse lenshellprogarchive.com.

eclipxe 4y ago

But hey, at least we have a great JavaScript ecosystem now, right guys? Right? Sigh. I too miss the good old days.

pengaru 4y ago

While I too miss the old internet, more the pre-AOL-participating internet. It's been steadily downhill ever since, and worth noting that it's now so awful even the late 90s/early 2000s look like utopia in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

p-e-w 4y ago

I miss the content of the old Internet, but I do not miss its tech. Web design in general was garbage. Not just the good kind of garbage, with funky animations and weird colors, but horrible typography, unreadable fonts, zero accessibility, horizontal scrollbars everywhere, images used as text, misaligned tables, no math typesetting, no videos, and no interactive content without installing more garbage like Flash, ActiveX, or Java. When writing server-side stuff, your options were basically Perl/CGI, and later PHP, both of which are insecure trash that makes today's JavaScript look sane by comparison. The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Perl's Taint mode made it more secure than most languages, including today's. Other languages later ran into the same security bugs that had been fixed in Perl a decade before.
- viraptor 4y ago
  I wouldn't go that far. Perl's got a very simplistic view of a tainted value with no context of usage. An untainted value will be fine for example for embedding in html, but not for SQL queries, paths, mongo queries, json strings, shell downs, etc. The protection/checks you get from it are really minimal in practice in comparison to Sonar and similar analysers. Ruby also had tainted values and dropped them recently https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16131 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16131
  - eduction 4y ago
    The simplicity is what I liked about taint mode - it didn’t purport to make anything safe for any particular context, you had to do that yourself. It just tracked strings that came in from outside Perl to make sure they didn’t get sent outside Perl again without being run through a regex. My main critique is that you don’t always want to use a regex to check safety, sometimes you want to try properly parsing a value before handing it off to another system. So in various places I’d end up untainting with a dot star regex.

pabs3 4y ago

Much of the old internet is still there, just outside the walled gardens of the modern internet.

danjoredd 4y ago
A good place to view them is r/forgottenwebsites on Reddit, sort by top of all time. Choose one and then follow the links on those pages to other websites and "surf." Its a fun pasttime. edit it seems that Angelfire is still live, so you can view sites made on that
- denvermullets 4y ago
  that was a fun rabbit hole, thanks haha.

throwaway742 4y ago

You and me too sibling. We really lost something.