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Cameron's World

cameronsworld.net

249 pointszeitg3ist63 comments

I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.

I also miss the default gray background pages and the original horizontal rule (apparently you can't get that old inset look anymore).

You can achieve this with pseudo elements easy.

I think you and me might have different definitions of "easy" ;)

But, yes, I tried, and failed horribly to get an exact replica of the <hr> of the old Netscape about window[0]. Incidentally, back then I thought the introduction of <hr noshade> was the bee's knees.

[0]: http://i.imgur.com/WZfGllF.gif

Like the hidden Goatse hyperlinks on Slashdot?

Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly Go is without getting hate email for weeks...

A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking, improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on HN in recent weeks).

I'll make sure to revisit Clojure again, thank you. Any specific recommendation as to where to start looking?

Me too.

It felt like everyone and their dog had a website using websites like Geocities. In Denmark we had Subnet.dk and (lesser known) Whitehat.dk.

It seems like that culture is now gone, and people have went to social networks, which is more pulling content than pushing it I guess.

On the other hand it is easier to share content today, on Facebook, Reddit or Imgur but it feels different than visiting a random website and explore the universe of that domain.

Made me think of this: http://www.arngren.net/

It's a Norwegian technology/gadget retailer that was basically the Norwegian equivalent of what Radioshack used to be. Then it was sold to some entrepreneur back in 2000, promptly went bankrupt, and was bought back by the original founder. The design stems from the design of their huge paper catalogue back in the 80's.

Which reminded me of http://www.lingscars.com/

I had no idea she was still in business. Good for her, I thought she was brilliant on Dragon's Den.

Yes, she was. The website still hurts my eyes, but it works and manages to impart some of her personality, making me want to browse it more.

Scrolling down teeechnically nsfw.

Not two years ago I was having a conversation with an old friend that went approximately:

"Facebook, this whole internet thing, hasn't really..."

"...worked out"

"Yeah, this isn't what we thought it was gonna be. Let's just... "

"...turn it off"

There was a belief implicit in the idea of every human on Earth being connected. Many of the phenomenon that came about have made that belief look vulnerable to a certain cynicism, a cynicism about humanity, that we fear in each other, that we hold towards ourselves. A currency that bound us together face to face became fiat and then failed at scale. It is within the vacuum painted by this fear that the organizing effects of the old-world economy have been fallen back on, but I do not presently fear this cynicism, and I save my currency wherever I can earn it.

Link to interview with Berlin-based designer Cameron Askin:

http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images...

This for sure conveys a certain magic, I cannot quite explain how that happens honestly, but we have to recognize that the highly amateurish design makes for a more.. alive thing.

Hmmm, are we close to the next paradigm shift? :)

Perhaps there is a reason why after the perfectly smooth and metal-shining flying-saucers the next stage is usually biotechnologies..

Now you got me thinking about a notion i have when i see photos of houses for sale. All of them show rooms to styled and pristine that my first thought is that nobody lives there.

Any place where a human lives (unless they are suffering from some kind of OCD or whatever) inevitably end up having things stacked in corners or strewn across surfaces in a semi-random fashion. You can almost trace a timeline from what is on top of what.

I wonder if designers end up stuck trying to reproduce Platonic ideals, thus making everything look sterile.

I love internet archaeology. Contemporary Home Computing[0] has some great pages. I particularly like the one analysing the so-called 'Prof. Dr. Style'[1].

[0]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/ [1]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

I was expecting this to be David Cameron's new website. Was not disappointed!

I was expecting to see a story about some new colony that has no porn and lots of surveillance.

This is not, I repeat, this is not my old CamWorld (pioneering blog) site from the late 1990s. :-)

Still faster than Engadget's homepage.

And easier to use than Facebook.

So great. Yahoo should not have been allowed to shutdown Geocities.

This is great :-) My friend made a similar site, but not quite as extravagant:

http://rainbowdivider.com

Every refresh is a new experience!

Some friends of mine decided we're going to bring webrings back. This was my attempt: http://rcr.io/webring.htm

I came up with an idea for a new webring which is some remote javascript you embed in your page and it's hosted on github and people do pull requests to add their website to a text file to join the webring

Want to start a new webring? Fork the project, alter slightly

I should note that it's an entirely satirical idea :)

It is beautiful. At least there wasn't any Flash and no corporate-jumbotroned-conventionnal-websites.

If you like animated GIFs as art, you might enjoy Olia Lialina's work.

http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html (warning: page autoplays audio)

My oldest site is 20 years old, haven't updated it in forever, but kinda fun it's still there! http://www.coolsig.com/

So many broken links. It's a shame that more couldn't be saved.

If this was the internet of old I'd still be waiting for the first row of GIFs to load and my computer would grind to a halt after the fifth.

But I do miss it so.

Totally agree. This would have killed my computer back in the mid or late 90's!

I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome on my Mac (I do have a new Mac...).

We've come a long way. :)

>I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome

Well, to be fair, this is a modern website composed of artifacts from the Geocities archive. This page would be a beast if it were implemented with techniques of the era.

Looking at the source for the page, the author seems to be lazy loading the assets and then dynamically placing them in the page with CSS.

We've definitely come a long way.

Under construction gifs!

It's like finding an old TV show and watching it with my teenager. "Yeah, we used to think this was really cool."

Impressive. I hardly remember an old internet, but well, created a website at times when people used to use <marque> tag. :-) This site made me think about it. Probably we've lost something with this whole progress and knowledge how to design, maybe started overdoing it often? I don't know. Thanks.

The truly amazing thing is, that I can visit that site from my phone without any lag or performance issues.

Welcome to the future!

If I could only view this through my skinned IE 5... I never thought I'd be nostalgic for this, but I am.

Not enough tables in the HTML though.

But they did have plenty of frames though!

It should have a message that tells you to downgrade your browser for the best experience.

You upgrade it to Catscape Navigator.

> Catscape is the most advanced browser available.

> Version 2.324.46948633454654564646

My macbook got CPU throttling at 100% when I stayed at that page for around a minute :)

Should have bought a PC.

I was recently trying to dig up the IDE's of the early internet publishing platforms like Geocities, Tripod, MySpace (1.0) to try and do a similar project. Could only find the archived pages/assets like this.

IDE... I might be remembering this wrong, but weren't GeoCities sites coded offline and uploaded as static files?

Also... https://neocities.org/

Reminded me:

http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/

Warning: I think it plays sound, I have no speakers right now.

This is very well done.

So a lot of "new" stuff in the source (HTML5 doctype, "no-js" body class, apple-touch-icon, FB things etc). Is this site being updated still?

Wow...nostalgia. They should add a fake connection throttle to the site so all the GIFs take 1 minute to load and it would seem even more authentic.

My favorite part is the little green sign:

> Welcome to the INTERNET

> ENJOY the RIDE

That just reminded me of Mahir[1] and his "Welcome to my home page... I kiss you!" fad. Good times...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040905074540/http://www.ikissyo...

So much cheese. My favorite:

IF YOU STUDY THE MATERIAL ON THIS WEBSITE YOU WILL HOPEFULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR PURPOSE HERE ON EARTH HAS BEEN.

Funny how on first page right now there's also Bootstrap 4-alpha :)

Relevant: http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

Haha!

Can you disable the automatic playback of the music, please? Screen reader users cannot hear a thing over it all. I know you're trying to create a tribute to the web of old, but this particular throwback is not one I think deserves a place.

I can see eternity.

Nice work!

So much win!

Be afraid.

I just had to imp my car. Did a quick google search read the first two steps and then bam I was hit with a screen taking over advertisement that took me 15-30secknds to get off of my screen. The first thing that I thought was, "damn the Internet sucks." And I was let referring to my connection.

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