ahhh the innocent days of the internet. What a nice time that was.
I miss that feeling I had when I was young. When going on BBSes and then early internet. That it was something non mainstream that I was a part of. That I could find treasures with each Alta Vista search
Back when Yahoo was an actual directory, rather than a search engine. I remember being so excited because I found a single(!) page about industrial music.
Ah it was such a great place, back before all the nazi truck drivers arrived.
I bought some brass from this site a week or two ago. Those days still persist for some...
http://www.clockmaking-brass.co.uk/
This hurts my heart for some reason. I wish I could go back.
I didn't think this would make me so emotional, but it did. Wow. Thanks bud. You just made me cry
His first post of these web pages was also great! You should check it out for more nostalgia if you haven't already seen it.
this is awesome thanks.
this reminds me i need to get back to playing Hypnospace Outlaw
The developer actually chimed in on my last post.
Oh man, thats awesome! I played with the Winamp knockoff so much.
I really enjoyed a similar game, Mackerel Media Fish, which is more of a website/ARG hybrid. It's silly and has a lot of fun with the Geocities aesthetic.
BEST game
this is very cool.
I have a q. ive been looking for this screen saver that was on my computer as a kid. it was a lizard, going about his day waking up going to work stopping at a bar on the way home, with all the other lizard citizens. i distinctly remember a scene where said lizard is shredding papers and the boss says something to the effect of "you better not be shredding my files!"
there's audio, animation, was probably before 1997.
it's a long shot but me n my dad have been trying to find this for the last year. would pay good money for it even.
sounds pretty damn unlikely that anyone had a video screensaver with audio in 1997 or before, or later too. Or with a narrative. Screensavers in 1997 were pretty simplistic and audio was in some of them, but it was never full phrases. Why would anyone even have that as a screensaver? A loop of some lizards going "you better not be shredding my files!" every minute?
Are you sure you aren't thinking of gex the gecko or something.
im waiting for a response on my pop about what software it was on (edit, he says it was a part of a CD drive installation disk). my dad was teaching graphic design at the time and was pretty hands on with tech n such. i probably hammed the video up a lot, the animation was very simplistic, like there was a scene of him driving and it was just a kind of up in down perspective made to look like movement. each scene was probably about thirty seconds? with a hand full of scenes the audio only came up every so often. I think the shredder comment was the only audio beyond a little beep boop tune.
definitely not gex. im only so sure about the dates because my parents split in 1997 and this was at our old house. the lizards were personified pretty well, just like people bodies with lizard heads. this all sounds pretty ridiculous, i know lol.
Sounds like something from after dark or one of the similar programs of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)
I think it's very possible. CD ROM was the big thing around that time and the technology would definitely allow it.
Erm it doesn't sound like you were alive at the time. You didn't run screensavers off a CD. This never ever happened, it would be such a weird thing to do since you used the disk drive for lots of things pretty often. Hard disk space was valuable and video compression and decoding was very poor as a result of lacking disk space and processing power. Screen savers were not made to tell stories to kids, they were there to prevent screen burn in.
I never said you would run a screensaver from a CD. The point of mentioning CD ROM technology is that it took us from moving files on 1.5mb floppies, to 700mb CDs which were much cheaper to manufacture, and as a result media files became much more the norm and many store bought PCs could handle basic media. That being said, I doubt the screensaver OP mentioned was even 5mb since they said it was animated, and HDDs were big enough by '97 that 5mb was a drop in the bucket if the file was something you got a lot of use out of, which it sounds like they did.
Screen savers were not made to tell stories to kids, they were there to prevent screen burn in.
Come on, like you didn't spend hours looking at the windows maze, or watching the pipes, or watching the fish in the aquarium. Maybe that was their original purpose, but to imply that there weren't ones out there specifically designed to entertain, you're way off.
OPs screensaver is completely within the technology of the time.
Good link, I remember all those but it's entirely against your point. None of those use audio or have a narrative. I think there was one with a haunted house on a hill that had very short audio clips in it, but nothing like a full voice over. Because it would be insane to have a talking screensaver at work.
NGL, sometimes when I see a horrifically over-designed and barely-navigable modern site I miss this style of website design. Maybe not so much the tiled backgrounds though lol.
Very nice, I loved the last one but the only site I remember was C Net lol
Thanks a lot for this. I like to know that this stuff still exists. Sometimes I just stare at the home pages and zone out, transported to some far away time like our own but different. Excited by the changes, not jaded. Driven by a lust to see the future manifest within my lifetime.
Remember a handful of these would have had random music playing when you visited the page lol.
Wow! They need you over at /r/oldinternet.
Where do you get these from, simple image searches?
Dude, your posted content broke me. I'm having a nostalgic passionate breakdown over here. Couldnt sleep cause of endless business stress and anger and frustration and coming to this now has just really been an experience. I dont know how to describe it.
No lie, not ashamed, I've been to that Cathy site.
God I miss those days
now everything on the internet is so corporate and professional
Anyone know of any active pages that still look like this?
I came across this one last year - long story short it's run by a guy who did an obscure synth song that Boards of Canada played on their Societas X Mixtape.
www.aveleyman.com is a good one too, basically an actor headshot oriented simple version of IMDB, they still update regularly
Aveleyman was the best because it was the go-to over IMDB if you wanted to know what an actor looked like early on in their career by showing photos of their roles and they'd have the classic posters on the front page of their site.
The original website for the movie Space Jam (1996) is still up. Geocities!
https://www.chrismcovell.com/index2.html kind of has that old style, and it still gets updated occasionally. Most of the content is about homebrews/mods for old game consoles, but there's other stuff there, too.
Don Harlow's Esperanto pages - this is mirrored by someone else, so not still at its original URL; it was on vwh.net but may have previously been on Geocities...?
I love this. Your doing God's work!
I would pay extra to have sites look like this instead of having to scroll around looking for useful buttons in the modern "restaurant I cannot afford" template.
Websites designed to work on a phone, except that, if I'm going to be using them, it's on a laptop.....
Any chance you could reupload this? The download link is broken in this imgur album so I can't add this to your first post as my rotating desktop backgrounds.
The memories. I can hear my modem connecting as I look at these.
This reminds me of a tiny subreddit that doesn't get much traffic: /r/archivetourism. It's for sharing Archive.org copies of classic websites.
This is way more interesting than the internet now, which is so homogenous and boring looking in comparison.
This time there's only one site I worked on. Not only was it my full-time job for three years, but you actually highlighted a section I directly managed and the screenshot is showing copy I wrote.
And no I'm not going to say which one it is. If anyone doesn't automatically understand why, you are a clueless newbie who should go back to ~~AOL~~ Facebook, where you belong. Stupid eternal September ruined everything.
EDIT: Changed "you" to "anyone" so no one thinks I'm talking to them personally because I'm not. Unless you're the one who replied to me when I commented on the last thread, because I am.
Oh, wow, I had to double check the date on that site linked in External Links and sure enough, today is Sept. 9999, 1993.
The days when you didn't need a quad core to browser the Web at a decent speed
I appreciate the low bandwidth-ness of these but, my god, they are frightening.
i love these, thank you
Some of these designs are real clean even today
Back in the day, mcdonalds.com used to belong to a law firm, if I remember correctly. If you ran "finger ronald@mcdonalds.com" from the command line, it would return a valid user. Didn't take much to entertain us back then.
It hurts the eyes....but this...it was indeed very pleasurable.
Thanks for putting this together. How did you get the browser window (forward & back buttons, etc) to look like browsers from that era? I assume you used archive .org for this....I don't know how you got the browser to look that way.
I wish desperately for someone to train a neural net on these and be able to produce new 90s home pages
Bless you. Iām obsessed with Hypnospace Outlaw so this really hits the spot
this is the internet of my childhood, and I imagine that people born in the 21st century must get a similar vibe as when I read the "Wheeler Rawson & Co" mail-order in Read Dead Online.
Wow... the Mosaic browser... that's what was loaded on the SunOS workstations in my university computer lab, way back in the day.!
I and my Netscape Navigator 1.0 are ready to go!
I didn't get around to using the internet until the year 2000 but it was early enough for me to bare witness to these sort of pages
Webmaster as a term kind of died out, didn't it? I hear the term "web developer" more often now, and of course there are now many more specialized roles.
I wonder how much of it had to do with an increased sense of professionalization, as opposed to the era when it was much more a side-line.
It died when people suddenly realized that Web Mistress didn't sound so great and there are probably better names.
The Master disagrees.
As does Torgo!
It is now known as Web meister
http://the-web-meister.com
You are welcome.
It died sometime after sysops stopped being a thing for BBS administrators. lol
sounded too much like dungeon master
That's what was cool about it
Yes