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

I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 335 posts

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#101

Post by Jtsummers »

kronos29296 wrote: post #84
SubiculumCode wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs. Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.

Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.

IPFS seems to work effectively for storing versions of files. The downside is, as I mentioned in another post, that it's not permanent. Someone has to pin it or it'll disappear. But it doesn't require anything as complicated to use today as trying to modify git to do something it wasn't meant for.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#102

Post by jedberg »

I owned (and still do own) this book! I would spend many hours as a teenager going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book. This really brings back memories!

And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford library, and then send the telnet "Break" command at exactly the right time to break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access. Good times.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#103

Post by SubiculumCode »

kronos29296 wrote: post #84
SubiculumCode wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs. Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.

Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.

lets stick to concept for now, eh?

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#104

Post by mars4rp »

ChrisSD wrote: post #73
rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I miss when the web was designed for people who could read.

Then you'll "love" Microsoft's 1994 page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/

"If your browser doesn't support images, we have a text menu as well." coool

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#105

Post by jedberg »

Asooka wrote: post #95
jedberg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually downloaded a copy of the NYT article I was quoted in in 1996 specifically because I feared it would fall off the internet at some point. It's behind a paywall now, but at least I have a digital copy!

Isn't that illegal, since you don't own the copyright? Or are you not distributing it and keeping it for archive purposes?

It's on my website, which is a blatant copyright violation. So far the NYT hasn't asked me to take it down.

It could potentially be considered fair use, since I'm not making a profit and I provide commentary.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#106

Post by belak »

This reminds me of the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. It integrated with Square Enix's Play Online service but now that FFIX was removed from Play Online, none of the links work any more and the guide is pretty much useless. I'm sure we'll start to see more of this in the coming years. It's not really sustainable to keep a website running forever.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#107

Post by wila »

interfixus wrote: post #13

I read an internet article from 2017 and none of the stuff worked without access to all sorts of third party scripts and crap.

Yip, the irony is that the article about this does not even load on my tablet. Perhaps because of ad blocking at dns level, perhaps not, it does paint a picture though.

edit: also doesn't load on a desktop here.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#108

Post by neonnoodle »

dep_b wrote: post #89
CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure. But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and…

> It lacks animated .gifs for sure

Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#110

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

Somewhat Unrelated.

I noticed that the wayback machine no longer lists historical sites if the latest/last revision of robots.txt denies access. Has anyone else experienced this?

In the late-90's I helped build one of the first fortune-500 e-commerce web sites. The website was shutdown years ago, but it view viewable on the wayback machine as recently as a year ago. The company in question put a deny-all robots.txt on the domain, and now none of the history is viewable.

It's a shame -- used to use that website (and an easteregg with my name on it) as proof of experience.

Post reply on HN