A Love Letter to the Internet of Old(cameronsworld.net)
cameronsworld.net
A Love Letter to the Internet of Old
https://www.cameronsworld.net
59 comments
It's not entirely gone: https://www.lingscars.com/
This is some kind of Adult Swim ARG, right?
That was a fun rabbit hole. I guess she retired today and gave the business to her staff! Congrats Ling!
That's an epic design.
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!
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.
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.
You're right of course, used kilobytes instead of kilobits. Thanks.
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/
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.
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.
Its beautiful
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Nice.
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).
this
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.
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.
This site is spot on. I miss the marquee and blink effects.
Yes, nostalgia and PTSD all at once. Of course I also remember when gopher seemed like a little more than we needed.
MY EYES MY EYES
(2015)
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.
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.
This is amazing. Where’s the hit counter?
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
https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/globe_spin3.gif
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!
Oh, goodness me. Thank you for the unsolicited kind words. You've improved my previously gloomy mood.
I always wondered who was making the images and gifs
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
The WWW or Web, along with email, telnet, ftp and dsniff are applications that run on top of the internet.
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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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Edit: That last "What are you talking about?" part was pretty rude. Sorry about that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the contrary the Facebook of 2020 is far more a monoculture than the internet of 2000 or 1990.
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.
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.
Personally I’d rather have one hand crafted Geocities page about something someone is passionate about than 100 Instagram accounts
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.
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.
Monty Python brings back so much memories.
A Love Letter to the World Wide Web of Old
And not to be forgotten- https://gifcities.org/
Insert self-plug for my site, which many say has a 1990s look
For someone looking at this now it may not seem better than the internet you know. But it was.
Your site makes me want to connect to AOL to punt you guys. don't TOS me.
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...