What do you remember?
altavista - best pre-Google search engine. It would probably be the best post-Google-enshittification search engine today too.
astalavista.box.sk was “better” at finding certain “things”
Thanks for everything you taught me hack.box.sk
geocities
Check out neocities.org. I have my own, BossHobbies.neocities.org
Not any one site, but a class of pages you might call the “tilde sites.” That is, personal sites served from the user’s home directory on a multiuser host. Like: http://cs.example.edu/~user/
I don’t know, but none of my AOL keywords work anymore.
The world’s first webpage is still up.
https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Looks a lot like a typical gopher node (or, today, gemini node). Hierarchical tree, link, brief description attached to each link.
So nostalgia much wow
I remember watching that page on an Arena browser in an XWindows terminal on Solaris or SunOS. Back then, it was still hosted on the Cube on Tims desk.
And the description I got for this WWW project was “A system like GOPHER, but with hypertext”.
GeoCities
Geocites is no more, but there are multiple archives of those web pages:
Neocities?
I keep meaning to look at setting up a neocities site
There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it’ll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.
It was amusing. I can’t remember the name. I am sadness.
Not a site but a feature: web rings
You’re on a site about radio control toys, at the bottom is a ring control go to a thematically related site, maybe find your way around the ring to it’s start
Oh man, you just unlocked memories of a handful of cryptid and urban legend websites I used to crawl as a kid that were all linked together.
Used to spend hours trying to be quiet in the living room reading weird nosleep-style stories. Fuck I miss the early web. Web 4.0 sucks.
i ran across a web ring not that long ago. took me back—way back.
edit: do NOT go to webring dot org. domain is owned by scammers. dot com isn’t the old thing either.
Angelfire ones! So…much…pink…
Not from the 90s but around 2007 I think. There was a private torrent tracker called something like UGS-torrents. Where UGS stood for underground sounds. Pretty sure it was based in the UK and it focused on electronic and club music singles being released at the time from a bunch of smaller producers. Unique stuff I’m not even sure what to call the genre to be able to look for it today but a lot of it was adjacent to drum and bass, 2-step, or break beats. Super active forums with members making and sharing DJ mixes. I’ve been out of the scene for quite a while now but the few times I’ve searched for any mention of this place I’ve found nothing. If anyone has any information I’d appreciate it if you could share.
Far from exhaustive and unsure if it is still online but have you checked Ishkur’s guide to electronic music for an idea of the genre?
Thanks for the tip. That’s another great website I haven’t been to in years. Still hoping to find someone that remembers UGSTorrents though.
As the first boom turned to bust, fuckedcompany.com was a snarky look behind the curtain of the dumb we all built.
Netscape, I guess
Fry’s Electronics, too, tho technically the memorial site is still up
*.demon.co.uk and *.xs4all.nl, both now defunct european ISPs that made it easy for people to host pages. IIRC the future sound of London had their page at demon, and xs4all hosted all kinds of nerdy/OSS pages, and some weird music, too ;) Oh, and there was *.free.fr, too
Let’s just say that an archive of Penthouse Pet pictorials in the age before internet video was an absolute goldmine for 12-year-old me.
Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.
spoiler
rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today’s standards though.
steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.
When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.
One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡
You weren’t the only one searching for porn.
I miss Geocities and bolt.com. Apparently it’s a shitty app now, but it was once glorious.
What do you think of Neocities?
It’s not bad. Feels very familiar and I’ve found a few people who got very creative with it.
That’s not the Bolt I remember. The Bolt I loved was the best download forum that ever existed. Movies, TV, books, audio books, music, software, you could find ANYTHING there, usually in multiple formats, sizes, etc. The moment something became available, Bolt had it instantly.
They bumped around the world, evading authorities. At least once they had to start all over, and asked followers to upload everything they had. Alas, eventually the got stopped, and one day they were gone forever.
I know of a couple now, and they’re okay, but nothing like Bolt.
Edit: Found it, it was Bolt.cd.
