Internet Artifacts
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...
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.
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
"It was responsible for one of the first online web purchases - A large pepperoni and mushroom pizza, with extra cheese."
Two students had already sold weed to each other over two decades prior.
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.
It's a shame it ended right when I started. There's at least a generation or two or three of cool stuff between 2007 and now.
Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and... goatse.
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.
So fun! I adore everything this guy makes!
> 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.
Recently posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943407 (1 comment)
Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)
the site design is beautiful
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.
Shame that the Iphone killed the internet seems like it had potential
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
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.
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.
Love Tom’s Diner, didn’t know it was used as an early mp3 benchmark.
Cool, well there goes my afternoon to watch Strong Bad Emails.
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.
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.
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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 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."