What do you remember?
As the first boom turned to bust, fuckedcompany.com was a snarky look behind the curtain of the dumb we all built.
altavista - best pre-Google search engine. It would probably be the best post-Google-enshittification search engine today too.
astalavista.box.sk was “better” at finding certain “things”
Thanks for everything you taught me hack.box.sk
geocities
Check out neocities.org. I have my own, BossHobbies.neocities.org
I miss Geocities and bolt.com.
What do you think of Neocities?
mrcranky.com was a pretty good early message board that is utterly gone now. I’ve barely even thought about it for like 20 years, but it was fun while it lasted.
Wow, I just recovered a childhood memory
*.demon.co.uk and *.xs4all.nl, both now defunct european ISPs that made it easy for people to host pages. IIRC the future sound of London had their page at demon, and xs4all hosted all kinds of nerdy/OSS pages, and some weird music, too ;) Oh, and there was *.free.fr, too
Let’s just say that an archive of Penthouse Pet pictorials in the age before internet video was an absolute goldmine for 12-year-old me.
Early 2000s: The Mech Madness forums, for discussing Armored Core, BattleTech, Gundam, and all other things mech and mech-related. It was a decent-sized community, for the time.
forums
I miss forums in general
excite is gone and it was better than yahoo. its big mistake was yahoo added tabs and it did not so your page got bigger and bigger and longer to resolve.
https://warehouse23.com/basement by Steve Jackson Games was hours of fun back when it existed. Think of the giant warehouse at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (SyFy also ripped the idea off in the show ‘Warehouse 13’).
?!?! It’s alive? thanks!
Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.
spoiler
rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today’s standards though.
steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.
When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.
One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡
You weren’t the only one searching for porn.
There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it’ll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.
It was amusing. I can’t remember the name. I am sadness.
GeoCities
Geocites is no more, but there are multiple archives of those web pages:
Neocities?
Flashjokeoftheday.com - flash is dead. Has been for a while. The little jokes were great.
stickslaughter
flash animations of stick figure combat
Xiao Xiao 1-4 on newgrounds
