cozy 90s BBS forums, obscure blogs, etc.
It’s not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It’s based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It’s a beautiful thing.
4-ch.net (not to be confused with 4chan) is a 90s BBS that is still online and occasionally active. It’s neat to see posts from the 90s still on the front page.
wow nobody mentioned https://www.lingscars.com/
https://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
(Not really mobile friendly, which holds true to the old school Internet)
Sites that have old forums. There aren’t many anymore, but ones I’ve seen that have been very helpful of late include car sites, a timeshare forum, and the Fantasy Grounds forum (my virtual tabletop of choice).
I’m sure there are others out there, but it’s definitely more rare than it used to be. Is Something Awful still around?
That is probably the best website on the internet!
Ebay
I imagine their source code is such an unmaintainable mess that it’s impossible to modernize
it was written in FORTRAN
Aw i miss when website tracking was only “xxxx users have visited this page” and it was just a simple counter that counted up.
I remember being so proud when I implemented that on my first website.
Yep! I did it for a final project, called DANK WEB. We implemented an airhorn counter. We found out the day before that it just stored the value it saw +1 to the DB so a bad actor could reset the count. Then we easily figured out that we could just reference the DB so we fixed the bad actor part.
We got a 98 on the final. It was the most fun I had on a project in all of college.
THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html
I’m pretty sure spacejam.com showed that page up until the sequel supplanted it.
From a time when websites used
<table>
orposition: absolute;
to place elements on the screen. That website is just one big table.I feel that right in the MySpace.
Debian’s website….
hey, thats not fair, they redid it a few years back /s
Some examples that I remember are:
- The Berkshire Hathaway’s website (https://berkshirehathaway.com/)
- The UNIX website (https://unix.org/version4/)
- Xorg Project website (https://www.x.org/wiki/)
- Marginalia Web Search (https://search.marginalia.nu/)
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) pages containing Standards (e.g.: https://www.w3.org/TR/controller-document/)
- Pd (Puredata) Project Website (https://puredata.info/)
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/An Introduction to Everything2 - massively interlinked information site
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ - robots and people comic
https://realultimatepower.net/ - ninjas
Has Real Ultimate Power actually changed at all/added new content? I was reading that in elementary.
I see YouTube videos linked, and I remember being on this site before YouTube existed. I don’t think it has changed all that much, though.
Nope, exact same html.