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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, I just now learned that this page on that site has existed since at least 1999. It looked much the same actually.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991012063300/https://erowid.or...

I had no idea that the site erowid.org itself had existed for so long even.

Also, the archived version of the page from 1999 was using a black background. Dark mode before it was cool :)

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I did the original conversion of the text into HTML and it was certainly before 1999 and I'm pretty sure before erowid existed. One of the first resources for this kind of thing on the internet was an ftp site that I ran in 1991 or so. Eventually Brian Behlendorf set up hyperreal.org and I think at some point all the information was fed into that, and then later that got all folded into erowid.

Dark mode was actually pretty common in the mid-90s, then some idiot popularized the notion that black text on white background was easier on the eyes and more familiar for non-computer users and that nonsense continued for about 20 years (old CRTs were all white/yellow/green on black, stuff like xterminal displays often emulated their color schemes, it seemed like windows and mac was mostly where the white background was coming from -- lots of websites were the plain grey default background initially, but I remember black backgrounds being much more popular in the early web until they were nearly run out of existence).

Oh wow, the archive.org site is the original HTML that I did. Yeah, so 1999 was probably when I flipped it over to erowid after leaving UW or something like that.

That’s very cool :)

Erowid is one of the OG internet resources. It is an international treasure, and Earth & Fire Erowid should get a dang medal for their stewardship.

Edit: please consider donating!

Maybe I misremember things, but most websites related to counter-culture were very dark and "omniscient" from the very beginning (at least when I first discovered the web, around 2000). It was mostly "proper" businesses that had white or otherwise bright designs. Although in general the web was much more colorful back then overall.

Actually, at the beginning most websites had a white background because that was the default and it took extra knowledge and effort to make the background anything but white.

Not to mention that black text on a white background was what most people were used to from books and articles on paper, so it was considered natural.

I remember looking at the website (experience database) in the mid-90’s, maybe ‘96? It seemed relatively established then.

Amazing to think it’s coming up to 30 years now.

Erowid's previous name was hyperreal.org - '96 snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226004356/http://hyperreal....

previous to that it was a mailing list from '92:

https://web.archive.org/web/19971224110422/http://hyperreal....

The founder has other items to his credit :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Behlendorf

Where did you get the impression that Erowid's prevoius name was hyperreal.org?

I thought Erowid was the project of Earth Erowid and Fire Erowid, who founded it in 1995: [1] [2]

From [2]:

"Erowid was founded in October 1995 by Fire and Earth Erowid. The site was a part-time project until October 1999 when it became large enough for Fire to begin working on it full-time. Earth joined her working full-time in March 2000. The site was run as a non-commercial business through 2007. As of January 2008, operation of the site was taken over by the newly formed non-profit Erowid Center. Erowid Center now has four primary staff members, two part-time staff, and dozens of valuable volunteers who help process incoming data, seek out new resources, and/or help keep the site up-to-date."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erowid#History

[2] - https://erowid.org/general/about/about_faq.shtml#who

TIL - thanks for the correction. It looks like they were complimentary, I incorrectly assumed that links to the hyperreal archive that were moved to Erowid were a name change, I never saw that it was a separate site.

https://erowid.org/general/about/about_article5.shtml

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