Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 472 posts

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#411

Post by pottertheotter »

VoxelBoy wrote: post #362
pottertheotter wrote: post #280

Many have already mentioned Slashdot. Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience. I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back m…

In case you're interested, I've recently ported Ultima Online to mobile via Unity+ClassicUO: https://github.com/voxelboy/mobileuo . I'll be publishing a blog post about it soon.

Thanks for sharing! I've not heard of ClassicUO. Is it the original UO and people are running their own shards?

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#412

Post by pottertheotter »

pensv0 wrote: post #364
pottertheotter wrote: post #280

Many have already mentioned Slashdot. Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience. I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back m…

Oh the original Rainbow Six on PC was really really hard

It was! I wonder if I'd like something like it now or if it's just nostalgia.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#413

Post by antoineMoPa »

Jemm wrote: post #387

The old Google. You could see a cached version of links. A search for a technical issue generally brought up the answer on the first page. Spam and click bait websites were effectively filtered out.

You can still view cached versions of links.

Click the small down-arrow at the right of a link -> Cached.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#414

Post by pottertheotter »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #284
pottertheotter wrote: post #280

Many have already mentioned Slashdot. Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience. I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back m…

The first game I ever played online was R6. Kids these days don't know the joy of finding a cable host so you could do 2v2 with tolerable lag, nor what it was like to fill someone up with a mag and for them to fall over dead 10 seconds later. I think part of the joy of that was the imagination of how cool it would be if it all worked right vs the actual experience, but yeah, I'll never forget it. I dunno why but I'll…

I think a lot of it was how "magical" it all was. All of it was so new. Same with all these websites being mentioned. I don't want to go back to the technologies we had then, but it was all paradigm changing then.

My mom would threaten to hide my keyboard. I was lucky that we got a DSL line really early (we lived in Silicon Valley and my dad was a software engineer) so taking my keyboard was the only way she knew I would be up still.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#415

Post by topkai22 »

lostgame wrote: post #288
topkai22 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not really web at all, but I miss buying a gaming magazine at the grocery store and getting a cd full of demos included with it. That was fun

Why is this just so much more fun than trying things online? I bought so many games because I became addicted to the demos, particularly a few Sierra games.

I suspect the constraints made it better. You’d already dropped a small amount of money on the magazine, built up the anticipation of getting it home, and now you were definitely going to give the demo a good whirl.

Also, demos /shareware were an important marketing mechanism back then, companies took them seriously.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#416

Post by jblarneyforward »

ajtjp wrote: post #351

It's not really one website per se, but finding someone's old website that they'd built up over the years in the '90s with all sorts of interesting, detailed, yet approachable content. Sometimes academics, sometimes just people with interesting hobbies. There's a certain je ne sais quoi about them that most blogs these days just don't have, and I could get lost in some of those sites. Every so often I still find one,…

What about messenger/WhatsApp/insta?

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#417

Post by jeromescuggs »

mingthemerciless

i cant even explain it but

https://imgur.com/a/WszvRT5

just a front page that endlessly looped random static or animated images that had a perfect mix of absurd, funny, and oddly enough aesthetic qualities

these screenshots are of images that have to be over a decade old, maybe 12-15 years? i managed to grab them from waybackmachine which was crazy because never knew anything about the site and when it disappeared i would google around and couldn't find anything about it for years. low-key started to wonder if it was even real, if i was losing my mind, heh.

i miss sites like that which existed just to exist or whatever, there wasn't any (obvious) point or information, not really even something like a copyright notice. just someone armed with photoshop, font packs, flash, and a weird sense of humor and the resources to host it online

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#418

Post by stevekemp »

vardump wrote: post #7

1996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then. Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam. Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.

You wrote "altavista", and I heard "astalatista" which was a site I followed, for the cracks and reverse-engineering content.

Astalavista and +Fravia's reverse engineering sites were a lot of fun to follow back in the day, when reverse engineering anti-piracy dongles that plugged into your PC's parallel-port.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#419

Post by stevekemp »

f00zz wrote: post #166

Advogato, an early social network blog site for open source developers. The site itself was implemented as an Apache module written in C.

Advogato was a great site! I had a couple of accounts as my first was lost in a disk/server crash.

There was even an XSS-based worm that hit the site at one point, but the bookmarked link I have for it is gone. I know I reported a couple of similar issues later:

https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato

https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato2

Post reply on HN