101–110 of 130 posts
That was the sort of site that made the early Internet such a majestic time waster. I used to stay up all night in the university CS lab on a Sun SPARCstation surfing with Mosaic.
Yes, kids, there was a web browser before Netscape.
I'm not mentioning them because of the quality of the content on there, which was mostly terrible. I'm mentioning them because they represent a different time, they represent all that was particular about the Internet of that time.
Today's Internet is faster, easier to access, with better services and if really want the weird stuff that used to live on Geocities it's still out there.
But Geocities represents more than just its content. They represent a time when the Internet was literally that. A place where you could do anything you want, and where all content producers were playing on the same playing field.
I believe Geocities is one of the best sites to represent that era.
everything2, which is still around
All the forums of yesteryears. These are the neighborhoods where I grew up and to which I can never return. There were no "kids on my street." My school graduating class was 21 people. I met and talked to people and learned online, instead.
For me it's not so much websites as it is the old BBSes I spent my early teens calling up, and of course the door games. MajorMUD, LORD, TradeWars 2002, Usurper, Fazuul. You can still play these games, but playing with the other nerds in my town was really something special. There was also a MUD I played called MUME which is actually still up and still has an active playerbase [0]. Then there were the phone conferenc…
fuckedcompany.com - it was full of brilliant stories about the crazy things dotcom companies were up to. I'm sure a version for current startups would be equally fun.
* Personal websites from before blogging become commonplace - often part of web rings where you could visit one after another page. * My own and my friends silly pages. * Not a page but a feature: referrers weren't blocked so we could check who sent us traffic and visit their pages. * searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular.
"searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular" I wish I could give people these days an idea of what this was like.
I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller list of blogs I read regularly. I also…