I'm too young to remember any specific website, but I'd like to know about your old internet habits, webrings and such. I wonder how many of them are still active.
I recall astalavista.box.sk for cracks etc, but don't think I've heard altervista. do you happen to remember the full domain? would be interested to see if there is a web archive of it.
> Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.
happypuppy.com (happy puppy games). Used to have all sorts of shareware in the 90s, and free demos. Sadly gone now apparently, but here's a reddit thread discussing it 10 years ago about how someone hadn't thought about it for 10 years previous to then!
I spent so many hours on bash.org. And then it had a bit of a resurgence during the early smartphone era when I had mobile internet access but only a few megabytes of network quota - browsing http://bash.org/?random1 was maybe the highest entertainment per kilobyte around.
Everything2.com. Yes, it's still around, yet I've always found that the really interesting, amusing posts are from circa 2000, so that would appear to be its golden age.
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadaltervista had cracks for windows shareware.
Had a huge impact on me; it encouraged science exploration, investigation, skepticism, curiosity, and hands-on experimentation.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
geocities' taxonomies where amazing to both find and get your content found. so many x-files fan pages under area51.
A cavernous den of practical info, and mystery!
I was sad to hear that Fravia passed away - they were such an inspiration to a kid learning about computers.
Edited to add parenthesis, now that I have flicked through it a bit.
(nws if you end up googling it)
“A pioneering shock site has now been repurposed to provide amusing e-mail addresses for anyone willing to cough up $50 for an Indiegogo project.”
https://www.cnet.com/news/grab-your-own-goatse-e-mail-addres...
HappyHacker
Find the Pope in the Porsche
sidewalk.com
> Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.
There were a lot of fun Flash(Shockwave, as it was called back then) games!
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/at1ux/anyone_rememb...
(It may be early 2000s.)
I really miss IRC.
http://bash.org/?search=Bloodninja&sort=0&show=25
Superb.
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.