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...
A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking, improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on HN in recent weeks).
I think you and me might have different definitions of "easy" ;)
But, yes, I tried, and failed horribly to get an exact replica of the <hr> of the old Netscape about window[0]. Incidentally, back then I thought the introduction of <hr noshade> was the bee's knees.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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].
I came up with an idea for a new webring which is some remote javascript you embed in your page and it's hosted on github and people do pull requests to add their website to a text file to join the webring
Want to start a new webring? Fork the project, alter slightly
>I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome
Well, to be fair, this is a modern website composed of artifacts from the Geocities archive. This page would be a beast if it were implemented with techniques of the era.
Looking at the source for the page, the author seems to be lazy loading the assets and then dynamically placing them in the page with CSS.
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.
I was recently trying to dig up the IDE's of the early internet publishing platforms like Geocities, Tripod, MySpace (1.0) to try and do a similar project. Could only find the archived pages/assets like this.
Can you disable the automatic playback of the music, please? Screen reader users cannot hear a thing over it all. I know you're trying to create a tribute to the web of old, but this particular throwback is not one I think deserves a place.
I just had to imp my car. Did a quick google search read the first two steps and then bam I was hit with a screen taking over advertisement that took me 15-30secknds to get off of my screen. The first thing that I thought was, "damn the Internet sucks." And I was let referring to my connection.
