Cameron's World

[eljimmy]

I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.

[bliti]

Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly Go is without getting hate email for weeks...

[mhd]

I also miss the default gray background pages and the original horizontal rule (apparently you can't get that old inset look anymore).

[kawsper]

Me too.

It felt like everyone and their dog had a website using websites like Geocities. In Denmark we had Subnet.dk and (lesser known) Whitehat.dk.

It seems like that culture is now gone, and people have went to social networks, which is more pulling content than pushing it I guess.

On the other hand it is easier to share content today, on Facebook, Reddit or Imgur but it feels different than visiting a random website and explore the universe of that domain.

[gadders]

Like the hidden Goatse hyperlinks on Slashdot?

[vidarh]

Made me think of this: http://www.arngren.net/

It's a Norwegian technology/gadget retailer that was basically the Norwegian equivalent of what Radioshack used to be. Then it was sold to some entrepreneur back in 2000, promptly went bankrupt, and was bought back by the original founder. The design stems from the design of their huge paper catalogue back in the 80's.

[ddmf]

Which reminded me of http://www.lingscars.com/

[bpicolo]

Scrolling down teeechnically nsfw.

[knappador]

Not two years ago I was having a conversation with an old friend that went approximately:

"Facebook, this whole internet thing, hasn't really..."

"...worked out"

"Yeah, this isn't what we thought it was gonna be. Let's just... "

"...turn it off"

There was a belief implicit in the idea of every human on Earth being connected. Many of the phenomenon that came about have made that belief look vulnerable to a certain cynicism, a cynicism about humanity, that we fear in each other, that we hold towards ourselves. A currency that bound us together face to face became fiat and then failed at scale. It is within the vacuum painted by this fear that the organizing effects of the old-world economy have been fallen back on, but I do not presently fear this cynicism, and I save my currency wherever I can earn it.

[fitzwatermellow]

Link to interview with Berlin-based designer Cameron Askin:

http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images...

[MrBra]

This for sure conveys a certain magic, I cannot quite explain how that happens honestly, but we have to recognize that the highly amateurish design makes for a more.. alive thing.

Hmmm, are we close to the next paradigm shift? :)

Perhaps there is a reason why after the perfectly smooth and metal-shining flying-saucers the next stage is usually biotechnologies..

[digi_owl]

Now you got me thinking about a notion i have when i see photos of houses for sale. All of them show rooms to styled and pristine that my first thought is that nobody lives there.

Any place where a human lives (unless they are suffering from some kind of OCD or whatever) inevitably end up having things stacked in corners or strewn across surfaces in a semi-random fashion. You can almost trace a timeline from what is on top of what.

I wonder if designers end up stuck trying to reproduce Platonic ideals, thus making everything look sterile.

[bjz_]

I love internet archaeology. Contemporary Home Computing[0] has some great pages. I particularly like the one analysing the so-called 'Prof. Dr. Style'[1].

[0]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/ [1]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

[htor]

I was expecting this to be David Cameron's new website. Was not disappointed!

[cpncrunch]

I was expecting to see a story about some new colony that has no porn and lots of surveillance.

[camworld]

This is not, I repeat, this is not my old CamWorld (pioneering blog) site from the late 1990s. :-)

[rayiner]

Still faster than Engadget's homepage.

[smrtinsert]

And easier to use than Facebook.

[amilr]

So great. Yahoo should not have been allowed to shutdown Geocities.

[feld]

This is great :-) My friend made a similar site, but not quite as extravagant:

http://rainbowdivider.com

Every refresh is a new experience!

[rcr]

Some friends of mine decided we're going to bring webrings back. This was my attempt: http://rcr.io/webring.htm

[smonff]

It is beautiful. At least there wasn't any Flash and no corporate-jumbotroned-conventionnal-websites.

[schoen]

If you like animated GIFs as art, you might enjoy Olia Lialina's work.

http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html (warning: page autoplays audio)

[ekanes]

My oldest site is 20 years old, haven't updated it in forever, but kinda fun it's still there! http://www.coolsig.com/

[Uptrenda]

So many broken links. It's a shame that more couldn't be saved.

[harrylove]

If this was the internet of old I'd still be waiting for the first row of GIFs to load and my computer would grind to a halt after the fifth.

But I do miss it so.

[sideproject]

Totally agree. This would have killed my computer back in the mid or late 90's!

I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome on my Mac (I do have a new Mac...).

We've come a long way. :)

[a3n]

Under construction gifs!

It's like finding an old TV show and watching it with my teenager. "Yeah, we used to think this was really cool."

[barteklev]

Impressive. I hardly remember an old internet, but well, created a website at times when people used to use <marque> tag. :-) This site made me think about it. Probably we've lost something with this whole progress and knowledge how to design, maybe started overdoing it often? I don't know. Thanks.

[axx]

The truly amazing thing is, that I can visit that site from my phone without any lag or performance issues.

Welcome to the future!

[aplkorex]

If I could only view this through my skinned IE 5... I never thought I'd be nostalgic for this, but I am.