5 ms·

Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online. I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers m

Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online. I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh: http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/ http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/

na4ma4 2y ago
It's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites on the Links page :)
pryelluw 2y ago
I tried to sign the guestbook but could not. Didn’t expect it to work but would have been nice. Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.
- lathiat 2y ago
  Ha ha thanks :) yeah the guest book was an external service. Along with the image based hit counter :)
hypercube33 2y ago
These are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?
- bitwize 2y ago
  I'm looking for a character shrine for Akane from Ranma 1/2 myself.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma came up with https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/, does that count?
    - bitwize 2y ago
      That's perfect!
- wil421 2y ago
  Smoking man theories were the best!
bitwize 2y ago
Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though. Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers. Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking. I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway. And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.
layer8 2y ago
The DS9 theme MP3 is still functional!
rapind 2y ago
The good internet is alive! You just can’t find it is all (google).
bamboozled 2y ago
I wish this was still what the internet was and not a bunch of walled garden xitter links I’ll never ever read. I love your website. You’ve inspired my to put my blog back online in 2025 and document some of the things I plan to build.
- fsflover 2y ago
  > I wish this was still what the internet was Here you go: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I've got the "surprise me" link bookmarked for a random distraction, it's great!
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Incredibly cool, thanks
Tomte 2y ago
I‘m so happy the Lurker‘s Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/ http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) is also still online.
- tessellated 2y ago
  I was there, when it was still in creation. jms is such a treasure. Listening to his autobiography, narrated by Peter Jurasik, is wholeheartedly recommended.
tobiasbischoff 2y ago
OMG thats cringe
ben_w 2y ago
Ah, I remember that colour scheme. I used similar in my goth phase, when I had a geocities page.
wil421 2y ago
My old website had a bunch of random stuff about DBZ. I still can’t figure out how to find my old geocities site.
- lkbm 2y ago
  If you remember the neighborhood(?) https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/ may help, since you can browse through screenshots+titles by neighborhood. But I remember my exact address, and it's not there. Archive.org has it, but you'll need your exact address.
SilasX 2y ago
Our rival high school’s debate/drama team made a website c. 1999, and by some miracle, Tripod keeps it up: https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com
coffeecantcode 2y ago
This rocks, love finding stuff like this. It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.

na4ma4 2y ago

It's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites on the Links page :)

pryelluw 2y ago

I tried to sign the guestbook but could not. Didn’t expect it to work but would have been nice. Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.

lathiat 2y ago
Ha ha thanks :) yeah the guest book was an external service. Along with the image based hit counter :)

hypercube33 2y ago

These are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?

bitwize 2y ago
I'm looking for a character shrine for Akane from Ranma 1/2 myself.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma came up with https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/, does that count?
  - bitwize 2y ago
    That's perfect!
wil421 2y ago
Smoking man theories were the best!

bitwize 2y ago

Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though. Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers. Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking. I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway. And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.

layer8 2y ago

The DS9 theme MP3 is still functional!

rapind 2y ago

The good internet is alive! You just can’t find it is all (google).

bamboozled 2y ago

I wish this was still what the internet was and not a bunch of walled garden xitter links I’ll never ever read. I love your website. You’ve inspired my to put my blog back online in 2025 and document some of the things I plan to build.

fsflover 2y ago
> I wish this was still what the internet was Here you go: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I've got the "surprise me" link bookmarked for a random distraction, it's great!
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Incredibly cool, thanks

Tomte 2y ago

I‘m so happy the Lurker‘s Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/ http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) is also still online.

tessellated 2y ago
I was there, when it was still in creation. jms is such a treasure. Listening to his autobiography, narrated by Peter Jurasik, is wholeheartedly recommended.

tobiasbischoff 2y ago

OMG thats cringe

ben_w 2y ago

Ah, I remember that colour scheme. I used similar in my goth phase, when I had a geocities page.

wil421 2y ago

My old website had a bunch of random stuff about DBZ. I still can’t figure out how to find my old geocities site.

lkbm 2y ago
If you remember the neighborhood(?) https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/ may help, since you can browse through screenshots+titles by neighborhood. But I remember my exact address, and it's not there. Archive.org has it, but you'll need your exact address.

SilasX 2y ago

Our rival high school’s debate/drama team made a website c. 1999, and by some miracle, Tripod keeps it up: https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com

coffeecantcode 2y ago

This rocks, love finding stuff like this. It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.