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!
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.
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!
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).
The curl output you post confuses me. Can you post the full output? The output you posted didn't show a redirect loop. But since you cut out content, maybe there was a redirect loop that I can't see.
If your album is roughly chronological like mine... watching the kids grow up, yourself and your spouse get fatter and grayer....they -do- get more and more depressing :).
It's been so bizarre to see that spike in popularity in the past couple years. I was big into Touhou in high school in the early-mid 2000s. I listened to Bad Apple and the rest of the IOSYS Touhou library on burned CD-Rs in my car (yeah I was super cool). Then, 20 years later the tune is suddenly everywhere, hahah.
Bad Apple is basically "Doom" of music video. It has display ? It can play bad apple.
it's quite understandable. The video is in monochrome so very easy to display, the animation is smooth and the detail is not too demanding, so even on low resolution display you can tell it's Bad Apple
It is now an overengineered and soulless website lacking all the personality that made the original a classic. It somehow manages to also be laggy on modern machines.
> 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.
> 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!
Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs and PE groups.
Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.
Napster is so old that I remember its DMCA-compliant reboot from 20 years ago. My college gave students free access to it, all the music was a DRM'd WMA file. Most people who used it also downloaded a DRM-removal program to be able to put it on shared drives and MP3 players.
"Alexis on board" has about as much value as saying "Richard Branson is an investor". The difference in their goals now vs when they were young and hungry is in orders of magnitude. They are old, out of touch and spread too thin to do anything noteworthy in rebooting an old brand. They're lending their name for credibility, in exchange for equity and board seats.
Fark feels like the echo of a dream these days. It's like the Friendster of news aggregators; it came on the scene first, set the tone for everything that followed, then faded from memory.
I only knew it through the lens of it being a (good natured) punching bag of somethingawful.com. Today it's still up and being updated regularly, while somethingawful hasn't had a new article in half a decade+.
Something Awful is also missing from this history. Maybe too niche? Though for geeks and gamers it was well known, and (checks Wikipedia) it was launched on 1999...
It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.
I think it might not be well-known how much of current internet culture cascaded out from the hive that was the SA forums. 4chan was started by an SA goon, as was bellingcat, for example.
"...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page... "
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.
> 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.
I was online (in the US) since mid-90s as well, so definitely many of these artifacts resonate. That said, I was also a new transplant from Russia so was looking for anything I could find from my homeland - there was very little. I could probably count Russian-language websites (those I could find, anyways) on my fingers, and they all IIRC were university-based. I do believe there was a lively BBS tradition via FidoNet, but I never got into that. Circa '97 I was stoked to find a .wav fragment of a new song (still remember which one!), the first audio file I happened upon. By 2000 Russian-speaking web was huge and I was downloading music videos and full movies from FTP dumps.
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.
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.
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.
Oh I've seen Wild Wild Country, that made sense to me and there's a logical thread to follow. Osho was also (for some time) a legitimately intelligent and charismatic leader/writer/philosopher able to rally smart people.
The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
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.
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.
> It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world
This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.
Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0]. It's lightweight on purpose, and the capsules (gemini "sites") are mostly text. There are aggregators [1] and even search [2].
>Check out the simpler Internet through the gemini protocol [0].
Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web, my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too, including gemini, which I really liked.
If you were around and paying for media at the time, good have seen it before films at the cinema and as a pre-menu sting (sometimes unskippable) on some DVDs. One of those examples where paying customers were the only ones irritated by such a measure.
It certainly had wide audience awareness in its intended form, which is why the many comedy interpretations (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg probably being the most famous) came into being and worked so well.
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.
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 was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more winding path from top to bottom.
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
I am a new-generation user, and I'm curious whether "Netscape" can be installed on modern computers. If it can, how would it perform when accessing modern websites? I really want to know. Thank you again for sharing.
142 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadBut 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...
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
>Google Analytics
* nav header; search (if you could figure out how to make it work)
* Table of contents
* main content pane
fun times!
So broken after just 4 years
Were you maybe on Safari/iOS?
Using yet another machine and curl:
Your request to http://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net is redirected to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ .
You never tried making a request to https://www.spacejam.com/ .
Go to https://reqbin.com/ and enter https://spacejam.com . It gives 1 redirect (to https://www.spacejam.com/ ) then HTML.
Reqbin receives an upgrade request to HTTP2, that it never follows.
Here's my full curl output. No redirect loop:
slyall claimed to be redirected to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ .
Now, I totally get it.
(Although you may have read recently as I have that 50 years old seems to be peak happiness for people self-reporting happiness.)
it's quite understandable. The video is in monochrome so very easy to display, the animation is smooth and the detail is not too demanding, so even on low resolution display you can tell it's Bad Apple
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.
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
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!
Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.
It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...
SpyMac → Slashdot → Digg → Reddit
Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a Reddit link.
Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!
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.
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.
I would also love to learn about the Chinese internet, which to this day is pretty closed to us.
There is a treasure trove of writings, jokes, stories, games, books, history in there we have no idea about...
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.
- bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its own thing)
- Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.
- Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.
Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.
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.
That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the leader doesn’t want the people with the money exposed to the outside world.
The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)
The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.
Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
0: https://geminiprotocol.net/
1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web, my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too, including gemini, which I really liked.
> ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission.
The font was not correctly licensed either.
I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and mocking terms.
It certainly had wide audience awareness in its intended form, which is why the many comedy interpretations (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg probably being the most famous) came into being and worked so well.
Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.
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
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
It works OK for http web sites, but for https, it pops up an alert:
Netscape 7.0 and s.yimg.com cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms.
(this was for the Yahoo! page, it's the same message for other sites as well). I haven't tried anything else.
I also haven't tried (and don't plan to) using the bundled email client, which was the precursor to Thunderbird.
http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/netscape/