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 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.

It's not THAT rare to see a working version.

http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/netscape/

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 never particularly liked 50's or 60's aesthetic, and always puzzled over how my parents could gush so hard over it.

Now, I totally get it.

They actually left the original Space Jam site up. I think the developers knew its importance.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

They managed to break https://www.spacejam.com/ though. It redirects to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ which has a bad cert and then goes into a redirect loop.

So broken after just 4 years

Hey give Disney a break they're a small company with only a few employees. Maybe tbe certifier is on vacation.

Looney toons is a Warner Brothers property, not Disney.

I wasn't thinking. you are of course correct. My brain conflated because both are based in burbank. yeah, that's what i am going with.

Hmm, I didn't get a redirect https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/

http://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ responds with "HTTP 301, Location: https://www.spacejam.com/"

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).

Were you maybe on Safari/iOS?

I love how the new Space Jam website is ALSO in the 90's style! https://www.spacejam.com/2021/

Oh man I forgot all about and 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!

frameset was THE basis for building manual-style resources back in the day!

* nav header; search (if you could figure out how to make it work)

* Table of contents

* main content pane

fun times!

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.

>look inside

>Google Analytics

They moved everything under /1996 when the new movie came out, and while doing so they broke some pages.

A photo album that gets more and more depressing.

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 :).

Yeah, so like life I guess. :-(

(Although you may have read recently as I have that 50 years old seems to be peak happiness for people self-reporting happiness.)

I found having to keep backtracking because one swipe advanced two or three screens to be very annoying.

This was amazing and reminded me of the first time I heard an mp3.

I was a freshman in college (Fall 1997) and the only music we had access to was either CDs or the radio.

Technically, you could download a .wav of a song but it was super slow (even on fast university networks) and they were huge so you couldn't save that many on the hard drives of the time.

One day, I hear multiple songs coming from my room. Songs that neither I nor my roommate had on CDs. And it clearly wasn't the radio as the songs kept switching quickly with no commercials.

I distinctly remember thinking "Wait, how is he doing that? He doesn't have those songs!"

Makes me wonder what technology is going to have that impact on my kids.

Lots of great memories beautifully bottled up and impeccably presented (as we've come to expect from Neal). I was hoping the million dollar homepage would be included, and wasn't disappointed. :-)

Did anyone else notice how the audio stops playing when you slide to the next screen, except for zombo.com? Haha.

Related Artifacts:

"Here comes another bubble" - https://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmNDym6CvQ (dotcom startup boom)

BonziBUDDY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy (predatory browser extension dressed up as your friend)

Digg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg (reddit predecessor)

RuneScape - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape / https://play.runescape.com/

Ultima Online - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online / https://uo.com

Demoscene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Warez - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups

I'm sure there were other notable phenomenons that didn't make the cut, what did I miss?

Instant messaging apps like ICQ for example.

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 finally 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."

That reminded me of Orkut, which was a social networking product, but created by Orkut Büyükkökten.

So he just reused his personal domain name for the product! https://orkut.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut

This reminds me of the joke about the guy who couldn't afford a vanity number plate for his car so he changed his name to CK-16450

later, he held onto hello.com for years with a "coming soon! the next network from orkut!" Supposedly you could get an invite but I don't know anybody who ever actually used it.

I think domains were even free in 1994. I think the owner of rob.com told me he just had to send in a form or something back then.

They were. I think it was 1995 they started charging? I had dozens of domains. There was a simple text file form you had to type over. Then they started charging $200/2yr for .com/.net/.org and a lot of us let our domains go which ended up being worth tens of millions a few years later during the boom.

(the story at the time of what killed the "free" is that Unilever mailed in 19,000 forms; one for each of their registered trademarks)

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.

Gotta love a Neal.fun post

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.

Maybe they came into money in 1976: somebody got an inheritance, they recruited a whale, etc.

That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the leader doesn’t want the people with the money exposed to the outside world.

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.

Also, we can safely say the advert completely failed on its mission.

I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and mocking terms.

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.

"...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... "

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...

Most people visited Digg for the comments, not so much the posts themselves.

My social media path is this:

SpyMac → Slashdot → Digg → Reddit

Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a Reddit link.

Digg is being relaunched - with Alexis on board.

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

> 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.com

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+.

Drew Curtis Presents Drew Curtis' Fark.com By Drew Curtis

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.

Wow. I knew about 4chan but not about bellingcat having its roots in SA.

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 thought that was basic common Internet knowledge, that Digg led straight to Reddit.

Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and... goatse.

I miss the days when I would be a dumbass teenager online and somebody would, appropriately, send me to goatse or meatspin or something.

Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.

So today you woke up and chose violence? :-)

Crazy to think this humble network of 111 terminals basically sparked the entire internet revolution!

Really cool website. I like the interactivity of every little artifact.

The progressive loading of images in the “embedded browsers” is annoying though. I’m not sure if it’s because all images “load” at the same speed (this wasn’t true with dialup), or if it’s because the animation gets old very quickly.

It'd be interesting to see some early versions of wired.com. For a while, they had constantly changing visually impressive things going on that I didn't even know were possible with HTML / browsers of the time.

That just reminded me of original 128MB MP3 players, loaded straight from Napster. Ironically, I still struggle to fill an average sized modern equivalent with 512GB, even with FLAC.

> 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.

In terms of internet culture, newgrounds deserves a mention! Technically still up, but not the same, as with most things.

> Appearing in 1997, Ask Jeeves revolutionized search by allowing users to make queries with natural language

Man Ask Jeeves was way overhead its time.

Ask Jeeves as a search engine was pretty awful. The natural language thing was a UX gimmick because it was a time when internet users wrote in full sentences. The pendulum has now swung the other way where the search engine now writes out things for us because its users can't write more than 140 chars at a time.

This was fantastic. There are so many possible artifacts that could be covered. Would be cool if each year could be extended to include multiple artifacts! The "Ultimate Showdown" song is apparently still perfectly preserved in my mind. :)

It mentions a few classic flash movies, but doesn't mention the Flash hosting site Newgrounds.

surprised no mention of Craigslist? or is it not an "Internet artifact" because it remains in essentially its original form...?

"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.

The "first MP3", without the background music, and just the voice, sounds a lot better to me than the original I listened to on YouTube. I liked the MP3 more.

Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good, but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person singing without music I guess, something poetic.

The acapella version of “Tom’s Diner” is, in fact, the original. The dance version was first put out as an unauthorized remix, but Suzanne Vega liked it and they negotiated an agreement.

How does Heaven's Gate server manage to stay online? Do they also update it to keep up with security patches or that isn't necessary?

There are members of the cult who took the sacrifice to not follow the others to the comet and maintain the cult's presence and memory on the doomed Earth. They give interviews now and then.

Recently posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943407 (1 comment)

Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)

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

When I think early 2000s I think Jagex Games Domain Castle.

No mention of AltaVista?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

PS. Astalavista was also fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk

Yeah, I agree that is pretty glaring omission. To myself at least, Altavista was a huge part of that small slice of time, where it seemed instantly, the whole world finally got online with dial-up PPP, opposed to earlier when we might have been accessing the internet through gateways at a BBS, or dialup shell access from the local library or ISP.

I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.

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.

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.

I remember "copypasta" was a hit during late 2000s

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music was updated in 2019. Forever ago in Internet years but more recent than the original.

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.

The hours I wasted on that helicopter game. It was the Flappy Bird of its day.

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.

Super cool!! I used to play a lot of flash games in my childhood, pure nostalgia

When I see Neal, I know it's gonna be Fun

Cool, well there goes my afternoon to watch Strong Bad Emails.

Beautiful. Would be helpful to see dates as well

Was WASD even around back during doom2?

So fun! I adore everything this guy makes!

Les horribles Cernettes (the band pictured in "the first photo on the internet") have a music video on youtube for their song "Collider" if you want to hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf4bmANuR-c

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.

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].

0: https://geminiprotocol.net/

1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/

>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.

> 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.

Love Tom’s Diner, didn’t know it was used as an early mp3 benchmark.

Very cool.

Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.

Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!

I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.

very interesting

the site design is beautiful

And I didn't notice at first, but many of the exhibits are interactive. For example the entry of the Hacker's Dictionary looks like just a picture of a terminal with an entry from the dictionary displayed, but the image is "live" and you can scroll through the entire dictionary!

Shame that the Iphone killed the internet seems like it had potential

This doesn't get said enough. The widescreen desktop Internet (even at 800 x 600) was far more creative and fun than the modern transactional app world. The 2008-10 era iOS apps being a rare exception, but that too was snuffed out due to changing App Store guidelines that punished silly apps and favoured the recurring revenue cargo cult.

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.

I'm disappointed that Bad Apple!! is not there.

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

I don't think bad apple was that big or important. I have just recently discovered it and I've been surfing since 1996

I'll say the same thing about all flash derivatives.

also, why scaruffi.com is not there?

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.

Here are some staples of the 2000s runet that I recall (haven't been there since then really)

- 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.

You mean the Internet? ;-)

I was thinking the same. this is a very american centric vision of the internet - especially when it comes to the websites mentioned

Works for me as a German, online since 96.

Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!

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.

> 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.

what about https://web.archive.org/web/20010630195810/http://www.fireba... or studiVZ, knuddels, or even xing, for example?

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.