I'm not sure how younger folks would feel seeing this...perhaps that it's ugly, less useful, sparse. And they'd be a bit right.
But for me this was a hit of pure nostalgia, flipping item to item. Almost like looking through an old photo album of memories you'd forgotten years back. Thanks Neal for putting it together.
Slightly fun fact - the original Space Jam site stayed intact until 2021!
For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version
It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.
By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1
Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
I was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more winding path from top to bottom.
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
This was amazing and reminded me of the first time I heard an mp3.
I was a freshman in college (Fall 1997) and the only music we had access to was either CDs or the radio.
Technically, you could download a .wav of a song but it was super slow (even on fast university networks) and they were huge so you couldn't save that many on the hard drives of the time.
One day, I hear multiple songs coming from my room. Songs that neither I nor my roommate had on CDs. And it clearly wasn't the radio as the songs kept switching quickly with no commercials.
I distinctly remember thinking "Wait, how is he doing that? He doesn't have those songs!"
Makes me wonder what technology is going to have that impact on my kids.
Lots of great memories beautifully bottled up and impeccably presented (as we've come to expect from Neal). I was hoping the million dollar homepage would be included, and wasn't disappointed. :-)
Did anyone else notice how the audio stops playing when you slide to the next screen, except for zombo.com? Haha.
I jumped over to the Wikipedia page of early blogger Justin Hall to see what he's up to. He has another distinction that he can probably claim: The longest recorded gap between registering a domain and finally using it to start a business.
"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."
Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with people in beds in different rooms.
Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
Cults will surprise you. When like-minded people are willing to put everything they have into a project, 18 hours a day with no breaks, they can accomplish a lot.
"...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page... "
Yeah, I agree that is pretty glaring omission. To myself at least, Altavista was a huge part of that small slice of time, where it seemed instantly, the whole world finally got online with dial-up PPP, opposed to earlier when we might have been accessing the internet through gateways at a BBS, or dialup shell access from the local library or ISP.
I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.
It is now an overengineered and soulless website lacking all the personality that made the original a classic. It somehow manages to also be laggy on modern machines.
> Geocities had an interactive 2D map, allowing users to navigate through these virtual spaces. (1994)
I got online around ~10 years old in ~1998 and got into web dev soon after. I remember using Geocities and Angelfire and FortuneWeb and all that but I do not remember this interactive 2D map. I do remember the various "communities" or neighborhoods but not this. Was it gone by this point or was I just so focused on the free hosting I never noticed?
It took me a long time to realize the web was so new back when I started out, less then a decade old itself. Pretty surreal to see where its gone.
Really cool website. I like the interactivity of every little artifact.
The progressive loading of images in the “embedded browsers” is annoying though. I’m not sure if it’s because all images “load” at the same speed (this wasn’t true with dialup), or if it’s because the animation gets old very quickly.
It'd be interesting to see some early versions of wired.com. For a while, they had constantly changing visually impressive things going on that I didn't even know were possible with HTML / browsers of the time.
That just reminded me of original 128MB MP3 players, loaded straight from Napster. Ironically, I still struggle to fill an average sized modern equivalent with 512GB, even with FLAC.
I remember researching about early era of internet while trying to make a game for a game jam about online shopping, and damn, it sure is a deep rabbit hole.
The "first MP3", without the background music, and just the voice, sounds a lot better to me than the original I listened to on YouTube. I liked the MP3 more.
Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good, but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person singing without music I guess, something poetic.
The acapella version of “Tom’s Diner” is, in fact, the original. The dance version was first put out as an unauthorized remix, but Suzanne Vega liked it and they negotiated an agreement.
There are members of the cult who took the sacrifice to not follow the others to the comet and maintain the cult's presence and memory on the doomed Earth. They give interviews now and then.
Ask Jeeves as a search engine was pretty awful. The natural language thing was a UX gimmick because it was a time when internet users wrote in full sentences. The pendulum has now swung the other way where the search engine now writes out things for us because its users can't write more than 140 chars at a time.
Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.
Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!
I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.
Les horribles Cernettes (the band pictured in "the first photo on the internet") have a music video on youtube for their song "Collider" if you want to hear it:
This was fantastic. There are so many possible artifacts that could be covered. Would be cool if each year could be extended to include multiple artifacts! The "Ultimate Showdown" song is apparently still perfectly preserved in my mind. :)
Thank you for letting me see the development process of computers. This is an incredible experience, truly unforgettable. Seeing Yahoo from 1994 was amazing. The interactive exhibit is fantastic, and I really love this
History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, internet lore passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the lore ensnared a new bearer.
This doesn't get said enough. The widescreen desktop Internet (even at 800 x 600) was far more creative and fun than the modern transactional app world. The 2008-10 era iOS apps being a rare exception, but that too was snuffed out due to changing App Store guidelines that punished silly apps and favoured the recurring revenue cargo cult.
Nice site. I miss the pre social media, pre-hypercommercial, pre mass surveillance Internet of old. It was mostly the product of genuine, sincere self-expression. Now it feels and even works like an infomercial, a scam, everywhere you look, filled to the brim with grifters and corporations trying to take ahold of your attention (and money). It's disgusting and inefficient at almost anything you attempt to do on it because of that terrible fact. It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world, and its enforcers: normies. For many, many years now, it's been the exact opposite: it's turned into the epitome of what it helped us escape from, and it permeates every moment of our waking lives, directly or indirectly.
The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0]. It's lightweight on purpose, and the capsules (gemini "sites") are mostly text. There are aggregators [1] and even search [2].
> It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world
This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.
Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
And I didn't notice at first, but many of the exhibits are interactive. For example the entry of the Hacker's Dictionary looks like just a picture of a terminal with an entry from the dictionary displayed, but the image is "live" and you can scroll through the entire dictionary!
As fun as the opportunity to reminisce about the likes of line rider was, I'm disappointed to see the omission of clippy, the wayback machine, livejournal, yahoo answers, something awful, google groups, xkcd, temple OS, stumbleupon, lycos, activex, toolbars, ytmnd, hypercam, winrar, Ted Stevens, slashdot and doubleclick.
Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
It's been so bizarre to see that spike in popularity in the past couple years. I was big into Touhou in high school in the early-mid 2000s. I listened to Bad Apple and the rest of the IOSYS Touhou library on burned CD-Rs in my car (yeah I was super cool). Then, 20 years later the tune is suddenly everywhere, hahah.
That's a byproduct of being a site made by an English speaker.
Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people from other places and speakers of other languages to make their own versions of this site.
And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has their own history. It's worth recording.
silisili|9 months ago
But for me this was a hit of pure nostalgia, flipping item to item. Almost like looking through an old photo album of memories you'd forgotten years back. Thanks Neal for putting it together.
Slightly fun fact - the original Space Jam site stayed intact until 2021!
https://web.archive.org/web/20210105185246/https://www.space...
Workaccount2|9 months ago
Now, I totally get it.
al_borland|9 months ago
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
JKCalhoun|9 months ago
causality0|9 months ago
srvmshr|9 months ago
https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )
It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.
By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1
Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
PopAlongKid|9 months ago
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
textfiles|9 months ago
http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/netscape/
alexpotato|9 months ago
I was a freshman in college (Fall 1997) and the only music we had access to was either CDs or the radio.
Technically, you could download a .wav of a song but it was super slow (even on fast university networks) and they were huge so you couldn't save that many on the hard drives of the time.
One day, I hear multiple songs coming from my room. Songs that neither I nor my roommate had on CDs. And it clearly wasn't the radio as the songs kept switching quickly with no commercials.
I distinctly remember thinking "Wait, how is he doing that? He doesn't have those songs!"
Makes me wonder what technology is going to have that impact on my kids.
sitkack|9 months ago
metadat|9 months ago
Did anyone else notice how the audio stops playing when you slide to the next screen, except for zombo.com? Haha.
Related Artifacts:
"Here comes another bubble" - https://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmNDym6CvQ (dotcom startup boom)
BonziBUDDY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy (predatory browser extension dressed up as your friend)
Digg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg (reddit predecessor)
RuneScape - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape / https://play.runescape.com/
Ultima Online - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online / https://uo.com
Demoscene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Warez - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups
I'm sure there were other notable phenomenons that didn't make the cut, what did I miss?
ErneX|9 months ago
jofzar|9 months ago
Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.
cgannett|9 months ago
jetrink|9 months ago
"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."
chubot|9 months ago
So he just reused his personal domain name for the product! https://orkut.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut
rob|9 months ago
dspillett|9 months ago
> ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission.
The font was not correctly licensed either.
the_af|9 months ago
I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and mocking terms.
jrowen|9 months ago
Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
jbeninger|9 months ago
pavlov|9 months ago
That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the leader doesn’t want the people with the money exposed to the outside world.
dev-slash-zero|9 months ago
FuriouslyAdrift|9 months ago
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...
throwawaycities|9 months ago
A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Napster, Limewire, Digg, GeoCities…to name a few
NoSalt|9 months ago
SpyMac → Slashdot → Digg → Reddit
Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a Reddit link.
tantalor|9 months ago
Loughla|9 months ago
lossolo|9 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
PS. Astalavista was also fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
vt240|9 months ago
I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.
3by7|9 months ago
bee_rider|9 months ago
Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.
textfiles|9 months ago
linsomniac|9 months ago
fragmede|9 months ago
rchaud|9 months ago
pests|9 months ago
I got online around ~10 years old in ~1998 and got into web dev soon after. I remember using Geocities and Angelfire and FortuneWeb and all that but I do not remember this interactive 2D map. I do remember the various "communities" or neighborhoods but not this. Was it gone by this point or was I just so focused on the free hosting I never noticed?
It took me a long time to realize the web was so new back when I started out, less then a decade old itself. Pretty surreal to see where its gone.
forferdet|9 months ago
maxehmookau|9 months ago
jmmv|9 months ago
The progressive loading of images in the “embedded browsers” is annoying though. I’m not sure if it’s because all images “load” at the same speed (this wasn’t true with dialup), or if it’s because the animation gets old very quickly.
pawanjswal|9 months ago
drivers99|9 months ago
spoonsort|9 months ago
oceansky|9 months ago
Two students had already sold weed to each other over two decades prior.
garylkz|9 months ago
archon1410|9 months ago
Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good, but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person singing without music I guess, something poetic.
pimlottc|9 months ago
meta-meta|9 months ago
pingou|9 months ago
textfiles|9 months ago
mrheosuper|9 months ago
Man Ask Jeeves was way overhead its time.
rchaud|9 months ago
the_af|9 months ago
Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.
Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!
I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.
BizarroLand|9 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf4bmANuR-c
JohnKemeny|9 months ago
Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)
Dwedit|9 months ago
accrual|9 months ago
james_chu|9 months ago
al_borland|9 months ago
pbronez|9 months ago
throwawaycities|9 months ago
mdb333|9 months ago
alnwlsn|9 months ago
mrheosuper|9 months ago
bibelo|9 months ago
BargirPezza|9 months ago
I love you and want to meat you. Lets shag
By: tyler
SchwKatze|9 months ago
james_chu|9 months ago
casey2|9 months ago
rchaud|9 months ago
joeframbach|9 months ago
beezle|9 months ago
ashishact|9 months ago
cainxinth|9 months ago
simonlc|9 months ago
Funes-|9 months ago
The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
yaky|9 months ago
0: https://geminiprotocol.net/
1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
epiccoleman|9 months ago
This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.
Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
youheard|9 months ago
jhbadger|9 months ago
hoshikihao|9 months ago
OgsyedIE|9 months ago
Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
cyberax|9 months ago
coldpie|9 months ago
pedrogpimenta|9 months ago
kome|9 months ago
Alex_001|9 months ago
[deleted]
aaron695|9 months ago
[deleted]
lucyjojo|9 months ago
forgotoldacc|9 months ago
Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people from other places and speakers of other languages to make their own versions of this site.
And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has their own history. It's worth recording.
urbandw311er|9 months ago
yaky|9 months ago
- bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its own thing)
- Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.
- Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.
kome|9 months ago