5 ms·

The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mai

by lunias 1y ago

The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses. The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks. I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.

pif 1y ago
> 8080 You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
- lunias 1y ago
  Nah, port 8080 because your ISP is blocking port 80 to try and prevent you from running a home webserver.
NetOpWibby 1y ago
This was a beautiful read. Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page https://blog.webb.page.
- lunias 1y ago
  Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.
  - NetOpWibby 1y ago
    Added to my NetNewsWire!
Bjorkbat 1y ago
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold. Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
- lunias 1y ago
  Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them. I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
  - NetOpWibby 1y ago
    > now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files). > Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do. YES.
  - Bjorkbat 1y ago
    > I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites... Based I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando. Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
hoherd 1y ago
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had 
- bigiain 1y ago
  This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page: https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.ozemail.com.au:80/~bigiain/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz... Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record. This bit made me grin: N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want (Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
  - apprentice7 1y ago
    That link automatically downloads a CDR file.
rootsudo 1y ago
Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
- lunias 1y ago
  That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P. I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.
hossbeast 1y ago
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
- Natsu 1y ago
  For me, it was much easier to make friends with the manager of the local Blockbuster knock-off rental place and order games via them. Though I did once walk 6 miles (round trip) to Wal-Mart to buy Illusion of Gaia with allowance money.
AznHisoka 1y ago
>> It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709 https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709 Millenial gray.
Aeolun 1y ago
The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it. The whole transformation stems from there.
- amatecha 1y ago
  Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    Here's a page containing mostly material from the 90's, lovingly preserved after the author's health eventually failed decades ago: http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm
  - 1313ed01 1y ago
    I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
- specproc 1y ago
  For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible. I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.
mtillman 1y ago
neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.

by lunias 1y ago

pif 1y ago

> 8080 You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.

lunias 1y ago
Nah, port 8080 because your ISP is blocking port 80 to try and prevent you from running a home webserver.

NetOpWibby 1y ago

This was a beautiful read. Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page https://blog.webb.page.

lunias 1y ago
Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.
- NetOpWibby 1y ago
  Added to my NetNewsWire!

Bjorkbat 1y ago

It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold. Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.

lunias 1y ago
Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them. I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
- NetOpWibby 1y ago
  > now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files). > Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do. YES.
- Bjorkbat 1y ago
  > I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites... Based I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando. Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.

hoherd 1y ago

It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had

bigiain 1y ago
This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page: https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.ozemail.com.au:80/~bigiain/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz... Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record. This bit made me grin: N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want (Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
- apprentice7 1y ago
  That link automatically downloads a CDR file.

rootsudo 1y ago

Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.

lunias 1y ago
That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P. I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.

hossbeast 1y ago

I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.

Natsu 1y ago
For me, it was much easier to make friends with the manager of the local Blockbuster knock-off rental place and order games via them. Though I did once walk 6 miles (round trip) to Wal-Mart to buy Illusion of Gaia with allowance money.

AznHisoka 1y ago

>> It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was

rufus_foreman 1y ago

>> The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709 https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709 Millenial gray.

Aeolun 1y ago

The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it. The whole transformation stems from there.

amatecha 1y ago
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  Here's a page containing mostly material from the 90's, lovingly preserved after the author's health eventually failed decades ago: http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm
- 1313ed01 1y ago
  I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
specproc 1y ago
For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible. I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.

mtillman 1y ago

neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.