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'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!
I got the loop in both desktop Chrome and Firefox, as well as Android Chrome, Brave and Firefox (though these timed out after a few loops, unlike the desktop).
Oh man I forgot all about <frameset> and <frame> tags to create navigation. From the early days before we had dynamic sites or static site generators with templates, we had our browsers do our "templating" for us!
Nice! Never knew that. I wish more companies with popular sites did this. I'm sure it cost them about no money nor time to just shovel it off like this.
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.
> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched
More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.
> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.
¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!
As an American, I'd love to see this. Been online since AOL came on 3.5" floppies, but I know the US-centric version is only half the story. An example I was exploring recently was Tetetext which I have no memory of in the US. From what I understand, only a handful of bigger cities tried it and it simply was not that popular here. Growing up, we also had the perception that the BBC, in general, was a stuffy old news corp and had no real idea about the BBC Micro since Commodore and Atari dominated here. As an adult, it feels like I missed out on half the computing world back before things became a bit more interconnected.
If someone is up for making such a site, I'd be interested in watching or even contributing if I have anything valuable to offer.
now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and any historiography of the early internet should consider that, indeed.
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.
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
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
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!
https://web.archive.org/web/20210105185246/https://www.space...
They actually left the original Space Jam site up. I think the developers knew its importance.
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
They managed to break https://www.spacejam.com/ though. It redirects to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ which has a bad cert and then goes into a redirect loop.
So broken after just 4 years
Hey give Disney a break they're a small company with only a few employees. Maybe tbe certifier is on vacation.
Looney toons is a Warner Brothers property, not Disney.
Hmm, I didn't get a redirect https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/
I got the loop in both desktop Chrome and Firefox, as well as Android Chrome, Brave and Firefox (though these timed out after a few loops, unlike the desktop).
Were you maybe on Safari/iOS?
I love how the new Space Jam website is ALSO in the 90's style! https://www.spacejam.com/2021/
Oh man I forgot all about <frameset> and <frame> tags to create navigation. From the early days before we had dynamic sites or static site generators with templates, we had our browsers do our "templating" for us!
Nice! Never knew that. I wish more companies with popular sites did this. I'm sure it cost them about no money nor time to just shovel it off like this.
>look inside
>Google Analytics
They moved everything under /1996 when the new movie came out, and while doing so they broke some pages.
So fun! I adore everything this guy makes!
I was blown away with how great of a website and resource this was and the way that things loaded (to emulate old internet) then saw it was neal.fun
Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.
WRT “You Wouldn't Steal a Car”:
> ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission.
The font was not correctly licensed either.
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.
Maybe they came into money in 1976: somebody got an inheritance, they recruited a whale, etc.
That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the leader doesn’t want the people with the money exposed to the outside world.
Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and... goatse.
So today you woke up and chose violence? :-)
I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly as late as 2010.
Digg is being relaunched - with Alexis on board.
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
> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched
More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.
> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.
¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
I thought that was basic common Internet knowledge, that Digg led straight to Reddit.
fark.com
Recently posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943407 (1 comment)
Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)
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.
> 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.
In terms of internet culture, newgrounds deserves a mention! Technically still up, but not the same, as with most things.
Beautiful. Would be helpful to see dates as well
Love Tom’s Diner, didn’t know it was used as an early mp3 benchmark.
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.
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music was updated in 2019. Forever ago in Internet years but more recent than the original.
Cool, well there goes my afternoon to watch Strong Bad Emails.
When I see Neal, I know it's gonna be Fun
The hours I wasted on that helicopter game. It was the Flappy Bird of its day.
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.
would be cool for it to be less west/america-centric.
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.
You mean the Internet? ;-)
I was thinking the same. this is a very american centric vision of the internet - especially when it comes to the websites mentioned
Works for me as a German, online since 96.
Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!
> Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!
As an American, I'd love to see this. Been online since AOL came on 3.5" floppies, but I know the US-centric version is only half the story. An example I was exploring recently was Tetetext which I have no memory of in the US. From what I understand, only a handful of bigger cities tried it and it simply was not that popular here. Growing up, we also had the perception that the BBC, in general, was a stuffy old news corp and had no real idea about the BBC Micro since Commodore and Atari dominated here. As an adult, it feels like I missed out on half the computing world back before things became a bit more interconnected.
If someone is up for making such a site, I'd be interested in watching or even contributing if I have anything valuable to offer.
what about https://web.archive.org/web/20010630195810/http://www.fireba... or studiVZ, knuddels, or even xing, for example?
now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and any historiography of the early internet should consider that, indeed.
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.
I'm disappointed that Bad Apple!! is not there.
I don't think bad apple was that big or important. I have just recently discovered it and I've been surfing since 1996
also, why scaruffi.com is not there?