The websites you were browsing, twenty years ago
August 19, 2015 2:00 PM Subscribe
InternetDir95 is a twitter account, tweeting "Every website from the Internet International Directory, published 1995". This was the year Yahoo! was founded (March), Windows 95 was launched (August), the DVD announced (September), and ebay was founded (September). Perhaps redundantly, the twitter account profile also says "many dead links". Twitter account by Jeff Thompson.
Aw, I'm a little disappointed that these aren't earliest-available Wayback Machine links.
posted by uncleozzy at 2:17 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by uncleozzy at 2:17 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
That was the year first connected to the internets via kermit and a 2400 modem over the university dial-up so that I could use Lynx to browse the web.
posted by octothorpe at 2:20 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 2:20 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
You know. I mean, not to be a dick, but something about tweeting these links seems so... wrong.
Like if you have them, put them up, fuck don't even design a page, just a big ol html of link after link with a br tag after them.
God I hate twitter. This is almost as bad as people who write long ass tweets as if it were a blog one after the other.
posted by symbioid at 2:21 PM on August 19, 2015 [14 favorites]
Like if you have them, put them up, fuck don't even design a page, just a big ol html of link after link with a br tag after them.
God I hate twitter. This is almost as bad as people who write long ass tweets as if it were a blog one after the other.
posted by symbioid at 2:21 PM on August 19, 2015 [14 favorites]
Hows was the directory set up? Some of these look like news groups, and some look like mailing lists.
posted by KGMoney at 2:23 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by KGMoney at 2:23 PM on August 19, 2015
I'm kinda hoping that at least one gopher site is still functional after all this time.
This one redirects correctly, so sort-of half a point.
posted by Wordshore at 2:23 PM on August 19, 2015
This one redirects correctly, so sort-of half a point.
posted by Wordshore at 2:23 PM on August 19, 2015
That was the year first connected to the internets via kermit and a 2400 modem over the university dial-up so that I could use Lynx to browse the web.
In those days, the savvy used Lynx to get on the web at all.
Nowadays they use Lynx so as to access the actual content of websites instead of getting bogged down by the half dozen different tracking tools, JS MVC frameworks and scroll-event libraries, and want-our-app sign-up-for-our-newsletter watch-this-ad popups.
posted by weston at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [8 favorites]
In those days, the savvy used Lynx to get on the web at all.
Nowadays they use Lynx so as to access the actual content of websites instead of getting bogged down by the half dozen different tracking tools, JS MVC frameworks and scroll-event libraries, and want-our-app sign-up-for-our-newsletter watch-this-ad popups.
posted by weston at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [8 favorites]
Dec 1994. 9800 modem. DOS, 286, Compuserve and Lynx (or whatever the equivalent was for DOS, I can't recall). Long distance calls to green bay. That month ran me $300 between internet & phone for internet. I worked at taco bell. That was as much as my first car cost.
Damn.
The goph' is still hanging out in the dark corners. I wanted to create gopher based social network. You can download a FF extension for it, even though they took out support...
It's a cool novelty, but still not quite the same as a full fledged gopher client.
Also? I want a PINE UI style webmail client. With black background and green glowy menus and the same hotkeys.
posted by symbioid at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [4 favorites]
Damn.
The goph' is still hanging out in the dark corners. I wanted to create gopher based social network. You can download a FF extension for it, even though they took out support...
It's a cool novelty, but still not quite the same as a full fledged gopher client.
Also? I want a PINE UI style webmail client. With black background and green glowy menus and the same hotkeys.
posted by symbioid at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [4 favorites]
Hows was the directory set up? Some of these look like news groups, and some look like mailing lists.
It looks like it was a combo book/CD-ROM. I had a similar book, the Internet Yellow Pages, which was just a full-on paper book.
posted by kmz at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
It looks like it was a combo book/CD-ROM. I had a similar book, the Internet Yellow Pages, which was just a full-on paper book.
posted by kmz at 2:25 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
I wish I could see the list of websites (hell, content too, not just a list) I myself was browsing 20 years ago!
posted by jjwiseman at 2:33 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by jjwiseman at 2:33 PM on August 19, 2015
Ah, the good old days when important websites had >2 periods, >1 slashes, and >0 tildes.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:34 PM on August 19, 2015 [7 favorites]
posted by tonycpsu at 2:34 PM on August 19, 2015 [7 favorites]
I used to have that Internet Yellow Pages, too! I *might* still have it laying around somewhere. There are copies on Amazon, still (for cheap, too!)...
Here's the one I had, there's also a 1997 from a diff publisher, and a 1994 version that's got a blue cover...
I first heard of "Simulated Annealing" through that book. Also, I think, "Memes" (Remember the Church of the Mind Virus? With the biohazard symbol?)
My life would never be the same.
posted by symbioid at 2:35 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Here's the one I had, there's also a 1997 from a diff publisher, and a 1994 version that's got a blue cover...
I first heard of "Simulated Annealing" through that book. Also, I think, "Memes" (Remember the Church of the Mind Virus? With the biohazard symbol?)
My life would never be the same.
posted by symbioid at 2:35 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm pretty sure that by that time (1995) I was using Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic or early Netscape navigator because I had paid some stupid amount for a 14.4/28.8 modem in order to be able to get on MUDs and you basically sucked if you weren't cruising at that line speed.
I also had a job at the university library and would spend a ton of time using their blazing fast terminals and labs that had 10mb ethernet.
I barely ever used the campus email system because it was on some VAX system and I'm not sure it even had pine installed as the client.
posted by vuron at 2:35 PM on August 19, 2015
I also had a job at the university library and would spend a ton of time using their blazing fast terminals and labs that had 10mb ethernet.
I barely ever used the campus email system because it was on some VAX system and I'm not sure it even had pine installed as the client.
posted by vuron at 2:35 PM on August 19, 2015
Also? I want a PINE UI style webmail client. With black background and green glowy menus and the same hotkeys.
If you've got a shell account somewhere you can SSH to, Alpine (Pine's successor) is easily set up to work with GMail or anything else that offers an IMAP connection using instructions like this.
posted by wanderingmind at 2:40 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
If you've got a shell account somewhere you can SSH to, Alpine (Pine's successor) is easily set up to work with GMail or anything else that offers an IMAP connection using instructions like this.
posted by wanderingmind at 2:40 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
Nowadays they use Lynx so as to access the actual content of websites
Yes, for the handful of sites that will render something approaching readable content on text browsers with no or little JavaScript support.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:41 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Yes, for the handful of sites that will render something approaching readable content on text browsers with no or little JavaScript support.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:41 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Almost all the links I clicked on are broken. This makes me very sad.
posted by grouse at 2:42 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by grouse at 2:42 PM on August 19, 2015
Almost all the links I clicked on are broken. This makes me very sad.
Ted Nelson was right!
posted by DigDoug at 2:43 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Ted Nelson was right!
posted by DigDoug at 2:43 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Is it searchable? The first site I built was 1995, still live, still pretty much as it always has been.
http://www.antiochsys.com/
posted by humboldt32 at 2:45 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
http://www.antiochsys.com/
posted by humboldt32 at 2:45 PM on August 19, 2015 [3 favorites]
hyperreal.com is gone. that makes me sad.
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:46 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:46 PM on August 19, 2015
HAHA .ORG BABY!
I think wiretap/spies still exists, too :)
posted by symbioid at 2:52 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think wiretap/spies still exists, too :)
posted by symbioid at 2:52 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Like if you have them, put them up, fuck don't even design a page, just a big ol html of link after link with a br tag after them.
Yea. I mean i'm actually fine with these being tweeted but there SHOULD be a site like that. You shouldn't just be forced to grind through twitter.
This(you might have to do a search for * to make it show a list properly) is an example of what kind of simple linkdump page would be good. That or some del.icio.us sort of thing.
posted by emptythought at 3:13 PM on August 19, 2015
Yea. I mean i'm actually fine with these being tweeted but there SHOULD be a site like that. You shouldn't just be forced to grind through twitter.
This(you might have to do a search for * to make it show a list properly) is an example of what kind of simple linkdump page would be good. That or some del.icio.us sort of thing.
posted by emptythought at 3:13 PM on August 19, 2015
That was the year first connected to the internets via kermit and a 2400 modem over the university dial-up
Awwww. . . .I remember vividly, as a high school student, driving to the next town over to sneak into the computer lab at the community college late at night to get "on the internet". And while I don't remember exactly all the steps we had to do to access the web, I do remember sitting in that dark lab, in front of that green text with the cursor blinking at the cmd line feeling this enormous sense of knowledge, astonishment, and being in a specific place at a specific time: the vivid realization that I was witnessing the future.
To this day hearing the (only heard now in movies) sound of ammodem brings those emotions rushing back. . .except for the sense of awe, which I still feel every time I actually pause think about our technology now. It saddens me that those younger than a certain age probably don't feel that same sense of awe, although it cheers me up to think about what future things for which they may feel the same one day, as well as a sense of rapport with all those in the past thinking the same thing about their new technologies.
posted by barchan at 3:19 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Awwww. . . .I remember vividly, as a high school student, driving to the next town over to sneak into the computer lab at the community college late at night to get "on the internet". And while I don't remember exactly all the steps we had to do to access the web, I do remember sitting in that dark lab, in front of that green text with the cursor blinking at the cmd line feeling this enormous sense of knowledge, astonishment, and being in a specific place at a specific time: the vivid realization that I was witnessing the future.
To this day hearing the (only heard now in movies) sound of ammodem brings those emotions rushing back. . .except for the sense of awe, which I still feel every time I actually pause think about our technology now. It saddens me that those younger than a certain age probably don't feel that same sense of awe, although it cheers me up to think about what future things for which they may feel the same one day, as well as a sense of rapport with all those in the past thinking the same thing about their new technologies.
posted by barchan at 3:19 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Yeah, gopher is still around. Here are the recent phlog (goPHerLOG) postings on freeshell.org using a proxy. I have an entry or two on there somewhere. And here is the floodgap gopher server, pretty much the last man standing...
posted by jim in austin at 3:50 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by jim in austin at 3:50 PM on August 19, 2015
I'm actually a little gratified that my untouched for nearly two-decades personal cobweb is offline due to mergers and acquisitions.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:14 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by ob1quixote at 4:14 PM on August 19, 2015
I remember buying a guide to the Internet for Macintosh—a mainstream published phonebook-sized howto—with links to all kinds of shareware Mac repositories. There were a lot of poorly coded games and ResEdit novelties running on the ol' Power Mac in those days, let me tell you.
Thinking back, there was an awful lot of discussion about FurryMUCK in that book. My brother and I thought it was a much bigger thing than it really was for a long time.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:26 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Thinking back, there was an awful lot of discussion about FurryMUCK in that book. My brother and I thought it was a much bigger thing than it really was for a long time.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:26 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Indeed, Gopher's not quite dead yet. Heck, I even launched a new Gopher site this year (admittedly, as part of an April Fools gag).
On preview: ... although MetaFilter considers
posted by metaquarry at 5:22 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
On preview: ... although MetaFilter considers
gopher:// URLs to be HTML errors — so much for linking to gopher.evergreen-ils.org directly! If this were 1999, I'd complain to the management.posted by metaquarry at 5:22 PM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Gopher isn't (quite) dead. If you create an account at SDF, which is its own sort of nostalgia fuel if you had a shell account back in the day, you can create your own Gopher site.
I think they may have pulled direct Gopher support out of most of the major browsers, though, sadly. Firefox still had it a while back; Chrome never did. On *nix, the commandline "gopher" program works fine.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:33 PM on August 19, 2015
I think they may have pulled direct Gopher support out of most of the major browsers, though, sadly. Firefox still had it a while back; Chrome never did. On *nix, the commandline "gopher" program works fine.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:33 PM on August 19, 2015
I remember going with my father to the local Egghead Software to get a Box of Internet. A new Internet Service Provider offering cheap(ish) PPP accounts had just set up a POP that was only a local phone call away compared to our then shell provider, The World, which was technically a long distance call into Boston.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:32 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:32 PM on August 19, 2015
I remain ever-hopeful that the Metafilter gopher server will some day return.
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:43 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:43 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Well, I could have run Netscape in '95, but Netscape + X11 was asking a lot of 4mb RAM. So I stuck with Lynx for a long time.
posted by wotsac at 7:01 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by wotsac at 7:01 PM on August 19, 2015
A very, very, very vaguely related tumblr on a conceptual level is this one that posts screenshots generated from a stash of old Geocities homepages.
posted by sparkletone at 8:53 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by sparkletone at 8:53 PM on August 19, 2015
Oh, jeez. I miss the old, weird Internet so MUCH looking at those old screenshots, sparkletone!
posted by town of cats at 9:48 PM on August 19, 2015
posted by town of cats at 9:48 PM on August 19, 2015
Neat! We Internet specialists call those years the pre-SpaceJam-years.
posted by bigendian at 12:36 AM on August 20, 2015
posted by bigendian at 12:36 AM on August 20, 2015
Oh, jeez. I miss the old, weird Internet so MUCH looking at those old screenshots, sparkletone!
There's a lot of whatever ones and a lot that don't work properly for whatever reason (though I find the "Could Not Connect" message funny in a screenshots of despair sort of way). The Earthbound one that went up today was neat. There was also a Deftones one recently that I had a very, "haha, the 90s amirite" reaction to.
posted by sparkletone at 1:15 AM on August 20, 2015
There's a lot of whatever ones and a lot that don't work properly for whatever reason (though I find the "Could Not Connect" message funny in a screenshots of despair sort of way). The Earthbound one that went up today was neat. There was also a Deftones one recently that I had a very, "haha, the 90s amirite" reaction to.
posted by sparkletone at 1:15 AM on August 20, 2015
My uni's library had dialup access where you could do library stuff. And if you hit Ctrl-Z you get a shell, and then you could bring over a precompiled SLIP server, and voila, information superhighway.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:45 AM on August 20, 2015
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:45 AM on August 20, 2015
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posted by vuron at 2:17 PM on August 19, 2015 [1 favorite]