I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.
Made me think of this: <a href="http://www.arngren.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.arngren.net/</a><p>It's a Norwegian technology/gadget retailer that was basically the Norwegian equivalent of what Radioshack used to be. Then it was sold to some entrepreneur back in 2000, promptly went bankrupt, and was bought back by the original founder. The design stems from the design of their huge paper catalogue back in the 80's.
Not two years ago I was having a conversation with an old friend that went approximately:<p>"Facebook, this whole internet thing, hasn't really..."<p>"...worked out"<p>"Yeah, this isn't what we thought it was gonna be. Let's just... "<p>"...turn it off"<p>There was a belief implicit in the idea of every human on Earth being connected. Many of the phenomenon that came about have made that belief look vulnerable to a certain cynicism, a cynicism about humanity, that we fear in each other, that we hold towards ourselves. A currency that bound us together face to face became fiat and then failed at scale. It is within the vacuum painted by this fear that the organizing effects of the old-world economy have been fallen back on, but I do not presently fear this cynicism, and I save my currency wherever I can earn it.
Link to interview with Berlin-based designer Cameron Askin:<p><a href="http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images-organized-neatly/" rel="nofollow">http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images...</a>
This for sure conveys a certain magic, I cannot quite explain how that happens honestly, but we have to recognize that the highly amateurish design makes for a more.. alive thing.<p>Hmmm, are we close to the next paradigm shift? :)<p>Perhaps there is a reason why after the perfectly smooth and metal-shining flying-saucers the next stage is usually biotechnologies..
I love internet archaeology. Contemporary Home Computing[0] has some great pages. I particularly like the one analysing the so-called 'Prof. Dr. Style'[1].<p>[0]: <a href="http://contemporary-home-computing.org/" rel="nofollow">http://contemporary-home-computing.org/</a>
[1]: <a href="http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/" rel="nofollow">http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/</a>
This is great :-) My friend made a similar site, but not quite as extravagant:<p><a href="http://rainbowdivider.com" rel="nofollow">http://rainbowdivider.com</a><p>Every refresh is a new experience!
If you like animated GIFs as art, you might enjoy Olia Lialina's work.<p><a href="http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html" rel="nofollow">http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html</a>
(warning: page autoplays audio)
My oldest site is 20 years old, haven't updated it in forever, but kinda fun it's still there! <a href="http://www.coolsig.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.coolsig.com/</a>
If this was the internet of old I'd still be waiting for the first row of GIFs to load and my computer would grind to a halt after the fifth.<p>But I do miss it so.
Under construction gifs!<p>It's like finding an old TV show and watching it with my teenager. "Yeah, we used to think this was really cool."
Impressive. I hardly remember an old internet, but well, created a website at times when people used to use <marque> tag. :-) This site made me think about it. Probably we've lost something with this whole progress and knowledge how to design, maybe started overdoing it often? I don't know. Thanks.
I was recently trying to dig up the IDE's of the early internet publishing platforms like Geocities, Tripod, MySpace (1.0) to try and do a similar project. Could only find the archived pages/assets like this.
Reminded me:<p><a href="http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/</a><p>Warning: I think it plays sound, I have no speakers right now.
So a lot of "new" stuff in the source (HTML5 doctype, "no-js" body class, apple-touch-icon, FB things etc). Is this site being updated still?
Can you disable the automatic playback of the music, please? Screen reader users cannot hear a thing over it all. I know you're trying to create a tribute to the web of old, but this particular throwback is not one I think deserves a place.
I just had to imp my car. Did a quick google search read the first two steps and then bam I was hit with a screen taking over advertisement that took me 15-30secknds to get off of my screen. The first thing that I thought was, "damn the Internet sucks." And I was let referring to my connection.