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A Love Letter to the Internet of Old

Author: elliekelly

Score: 204

Comments: 54

Date: 2020-10-30 14:00:43

Web Link

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DamnInteresting wrote at 2020-10-30 15:44:44:

This makes me oddly nostalgic for the days of painstakingly creating animated GIFs frame-by-frame. My animated GIF magnum opus, ca. 1996:

https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/globe_spin3.gif

bigcorp-slave wrote at 2020-10-30 19:51:53:

I just wanna say I love your site so much. Thank you for keeping some of the old internet alive by generating high-quality, free content instead of just aggregating it!

ikt wrote at 2020-10-30 15:50:52:

I always wondered who was making the images and gifs

elliekelly wrote at 2020-10-30 17:07:30:

I’m ashamed to admit that I spent many hours making my own frame-by-frame gifs in the late 90s/early 2000s and while it’s (I assume) much easier to make a gif today I don’t exactly know how because I’ve never done it. I’m sure I could figure it out but between Giphy and Google every gif I’ve needed in the last 15 years has been at my fingertips.

blululu wrote at 2020-10-30 17:44:31:

Surprisingly I don’t think gif making tools have improved very much inspite of corporate interest from giphy(FB) and tenor (Goog). That said no shame in spending too much time making a gif. During quarantine I made a gif using watercolors that took up a few hours. (

https://twitter.com/bnlcas/status/1253075048975351808?s=21

)

rapnie wrote at 2020-10-30 16:25:14:

Or how far removed sites were from current flat-pixel designs, where menu's could be embossed text on slabs of deeply veined marble (and you had to carefully craft the html to make all the image snippets fit seamlessly).

neovive wrote at 2020-10-30 15:37:23:

So much nostalgia for one day! Even Java Applet scrolling ticker simulations :).

It's amazing the think that birth and demise of Geocities defined an era. The collection of "Under Construction" banners made me think about how much the balance of creation vs consumption on the Internet changed over the years. As much as sites like Geocities and Myspace were eyesores, they represented creative freedom outside the confines of templates, news feeds and vanilla designs.

sarah180 wrote at 2020-10-30 15:50:19:

It's not entirely gone:

https://www.lingscars.com/

morsch wrote at 2020-10-30 17:35:07:

That's a 3 MB web page. That would have taken about a minute to download with a fast modem. I used a download manager for stuff that large. Remember GetRight? 5/5 at Tucows!

scrooched_moose wrote at 2020-10-30 18:19:21:

Where were you getting anything close to that, outside of a T1 line?

No matter what I did or where we lived, 56k dial up in practice was a consistent 3.2 kBps download. 128 kbps MP3s were always about 3.5 MB, which took about 20 minutes to download per track.

I feel like those numbers will be burned in my brain for the rest of my life.

morsch wrote at 2020-10-30 21:25:23:

You're right of course, used kilobytes instead of kilobits. Thanks.

conjectures wrote at 2020-10-30 16:57:43:

That's an epic design.

pcdoodle wrote at 2020-10-30 16:20:32:

That was a fun rabbit hole. I guess she retired today and gave the business to her staff! Congrats Ling!

stakkur wrote at 2020-10-30 15:59:27:

I think I finally woke up to the realization that nobody differentiates between the 'Web' and the 'Internet' anymore. The Web _is_ the Internet to most people now.

massysett wrote at 2020-10-30 16:37:50:

I think this was true several years ago but these days with such pervasive mobile app use I'm not so sure. I think people think Facebook is part of "the Internet" but they are getting there through an app, not the Web.

DannyB2 wrote at 2020-10-30 16:07:54:

The WWW or Web, along with email, telnet, ftp and dsniff are applications that run on top of the internet.

cableshaft wrote at 2020-10-30 14:37:32:

Very cool. I think I had a couple of those images on my old Geocities website myself, although I did create a lot of my old images (badly) using Paint Shop Pro (I think) and Bryce for 3d landscape images.

mekkkkkk wrote at 2020-10-30 18:47:58:

Bryce! Holy shit what a nostalgia bomb. Creating guns and starships using only boolean primitives. It was so weird, and in the end, only landscapes came out beautiful. I wonder what happened to that.

aimor wrote at 2020-10-30 17:48:55:

Very fun site! I was recently making a page with a throwback tone and was disappointed to find out browsers don't support playing standard midi files (not without javascript workarounds). I know this is old news, it must be the first time I've tried to play midi on a website in at least 10 years, but it really surprised me.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7677366/about-embed-midi...

alxndresp wrote at 2020-10-30 15:36:50:

Wow, haven't seen some of those graphics in a long long time. Beautiful. It's just missing the visitor counter and guestbook!

crest wrote at 2020-10-30 15:45:15:

Don't forget a webring of broken sites.

Threeve303 wrote at 2020-10-30 17:08:19:

For someone looking at this now it may not seem better than the internet you know. But it was.

thesuitonym wrote at 2020-10-30 17:59:37:

Castle Cyber Skull has a similar feel to it, but is much less "Hey look I'm an old website," and more of an actual personal site, similar to what you'd see on Geocities or Angelfire.

https://castlecyberskull.neocities.org/

temp0826 wrote at 2020-10-30 17:00:17:

And not to be forgotten-

https://gifcities.org/

jacinabox wrote at 2020-10-30 23:39:09:

I had a geocities website with homemade software. Yahoo removed it before it could enter the archive. It had a page with JavaScript that displayed modal dialog boxes repeatedly in a loop; Yahoo identified this JavaScript as a virus.

zwieback wrote at 2020-10-30 14:48:56:

Yes, nostalgia and PTSD all at once. Of course I also remember when gopher seemed like a little more than we needed.

_Microft wrote at 2020-10-30 14:28:05:

_~~ You are visitor [41,692] ~~_

Loughla wrote at 2020-10-30 14:56:39:

I legitimately forgot about that until just right now.

I would absolutely LOVE that count on some websites, just to see the traffic.

kipchak wrote at 2020-10-30 19:32:24:

Anyone nostalgic for this kind of internet might really enjoy "Hypnospace Outlaw", a game where you police an alternate universe version of the 90s internet.

pcdoodle wrote at 2020-10-30 14:28:16:

Wow, I like the transitions, they all make me feel something a little bit different (Kind of like a smell reminding you of a certain time in your life).

jFriedensreich wrote at 2020-10-30 14:45:07:

this

cycop wrote at 2020-10-30 14:14:41:

Its beautiful

forgotmypw17 wrote at 2020-10-30 17:03:29:

Insert self-plug for my site, which many say has a 1990s look

cbm-vic-20 wrote at 2020-10-30 16:51:47:

A Love Letter to the World Wide Web of Old

dugmartin wrote at 2020-10-30 15:30:53:

Sadly, I didn't see the dancing baby gif.

elwell wrote at 2020-10-30 15:37:01:

It's there, look closely. Try around here "window.scrollTo(0, 10400);"

ChrisMarshallNY wrote at 2020-10-30 15:12:53:

MY EYES MY EYES

tim44 wrote at 2020-10-30 17:28:39:

Your site makes me want to connect to AOL to punt you guys. don't TOS me.

codeulike wrote at 2020-10-30 16:33:07:

Nice site.

I was there, it wasn't that great, most of it was about Monty Python or how much people hated Barney the Dinosaur. The modern internet is much more expressive for a great many more people that geocities ever was.

ska wrote at 2020-10-30 17:00:12:

I'm curious what you mean by "expressive".

The modern internet is a far more consumer oriented experience than it was in the "old days", so I'm not quite sure what you mean.

QuantumYeti wrote at 2020-10-30 17:21:09:

I was also there. I don't really know what to say other than it wasn't mostly about Monty Python and Barney.

Edit: That last "What are you talking about?" part was pretty rude. Sorry about that.

anyfoo wrote at 2020-10-30 17:37:09:

I was there, and I am _still_ there regularly because my projects on old hardware often require me to use web.archive.org and follow the resulting web of links.

Every time I was amazed how different it was back then. Dense, but cleanly presented information, including links to other high quality websites. Contributions presented as elaborate documents themselves instead of a few lines in a comment box.

Nostalgia is strong, but seeing the difference in front of me regularly, it’s obvious the modern web is missing what this had.

whywhywhywhy wrote at 2020-10-30 17:52:07:

Personally I’d rather have one hand crafted Geocities page about something someone is passionate about than 100 Instagram accounts

krapp wrote at 2020-10-30 18:00:23:

There are plenty of passionate, creative people on the modern internet. Just because someone doesn't hand-write all of their HTML and stylesheets from scratch doesn't mean they don't have anything interesting or authentic to say.

I'm sure there are people on Instagram who are passionate about what they do - their passion just doesn't interest you personally, and that's fine. The internet doesn't have to serve the interests and tastes of just one kind of person.

goatinaboat wrote at 2020-10-30 17:21:41:

_The modern internet is much more expressive for a great many more people that geocities ever was._

Geocities even constrained by the technology of the day offered far more expressiveness than Facebook’s “fill in these fields and we’ll populate a standard template” approach does.

krapp wrote at 2020-10-30 17:29:46:

The "modern internet" is more expressive in terms of content. It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture of university students or technologically savvy American nerds, and no longer limited only to what text and images can provide.

Geocities, compared to modern platforms, offered more _technical_ freedom in that it gave you direct control over HTML, CSS and Javascript, and yet still many Geocities sites wound up looking very similar to one another, and the quality of content in many cases was more shallow than now.

goatinaboat wrote at 2020-10-30 20:48:29:

_It's no longer entirely populated by a monoculture_

On the contrary the Facebook of 2020 is far more a monoculture than the internet of 2000 or 1990.

krapp wrote at 2020-10-30 21:11:17:

I wasn't referring to the culture of the platform, so much as the culture of the userbase.

Besides, Facebook is anything but a monoculture - nothing with a billion users could be considered a monoculture, especially not a platform where people maintain their real identity and culture rather than adopting a "platform" culture like on Reddit or 4chan.

Also, obviously, Facebook isn't the internet.

trustfailure wrote at 2020-10-30 17:28:48:

Monty Python brings back so much memories.

tacotacotacos wrote at 2020-10-30 15:39:50:

This is amazing. Where’s the hit counter?

Shivetya wrote at 2020-10-30 16:00:05:

and here I am most impressed that the music turns off when you go to another tab.

still it does remind me how long ago some tv shows and such really were. just seeing an Enterprise E reminded me that that show ended before the Internet as many think of it took off

ChrisArchitect wrote at 2020-10-30 15:12:56:

(2015)

29athrowaway wrote at 2020-10-30 14:46:18:

This site is spot on. I miss the marquee and blink effects.

mymythisisthis wrote at 2020-10-30 14:27:27:

Nice.