61–70 of 143 posts
I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly as late as 2010.
fark.com
"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."
Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and... goatse.
Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.
For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ ) It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs…
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
I'm disappointed that Bad Apple!! is not there.
Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.
Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!
I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.
WRT “You Wouldn't Steal a Car”: > ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission. The font was not correctly licensed either.
I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and mocking terms.
Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with people in beds in different rooms. Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purc…
Cults will surprise you. When like-minded people are willing to put everything they have into a project, 18 hours a day with no breaks, they can accomplish a lot.
The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
fark.com
I only knew it through the lens of it being a (good natured) punching bag of somethingawful.com. Today it's still up and being updated regularly, while somethingawful hasn't had a new article in half a decade+.
It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.