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Comment by FlyingSnake | Hacker News Reader

Reading this felt like a trip through a portal into the nascent Internet in late 90s. I hope this never goes down.

Yes, this reminds me of 190 Bowery, a building in NYC that some photographer bought for $102k back in the 70s. He finally caved in though selling it for $55m in 2014. https://ny.curbed.com/2019/7/31/20732103/jay-myself-document...

The building was in the news again last week because it was leased as a sort of “WeWork for crypto” and had to shut down given the market downturn. https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/01/03/web3-co-working-hub...

Jay Maisel was the buyer. The story behind it is phenomenal. I highly recommend the documentary, "Jay Myself".

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jaymyself

I did Jay's workshop back in the 90's. He completely changed the way I look at photography and I was an assistant to Ansel Adams primary printer.

According to wikipedia, maintenance cost was $300k per year. Quite a feat, owning it for so many years.

This is incredible. Thanks so much for sharing!

Wonder who bought it …

I worked a block away in 2017-8, when the street-level floors housed retailer Totokaelo (RIP). I'd go window shopping just to be able to explore it a bit.

The basement held a giant vault, converted to shoe merchandising duty [1] … an apt commentary in the late aughts (and now, for that matter).

[1] https://i1.wp.com/gothamtogo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/... via https://gothamtogo.com/germania-bank-building-190-bowery-is-...

My favourite 90's style website, that's still running, is http://www.armory.com/armory.html , complete with FTP Index and user finger files.

Blocked by our company filter as an "adult" resource, so you might have to add a NSFW warning there.

There's nothing actually NSFW at the link, just your filter being overzealous

Perhaps they are confusing it with the San Francisco Armory, a historic building the NIMBY neighbors blocked from being converted into housing so a porn company bought it instead and turned it into a production company instead.

Not anymore I’m afraid. Sold in 2018

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory

They used to host their own servers there, but it went the way of the cloud.

Yes. I guess a few years of this was more than even the NIMBYs could take. It's now owned by some capital group seeking to build housing there, but new NIMBYs will come to the fore to block it, and the combo of declining SF real estate prices and rising interest rates may well make the project unviable, since a developer has to pay interest for a decade or more while stalling tactics delay approval.

Can't think why they'd add NSFW to that site, it's a plain text site primarily. I guess there may be something NSFW in the FTP archive somewhere, but I think that's probably an overactive filter.

> Can't think why they'd add NSFW to that site

As someone already mentioned nearby in the thread it could easily be something in the “purity test” content that has tripped an automatic naughty word filter.

It could even be the name of the site, depending on the location weapons and such might be considered NSFW (or for overly strict companies, not-relevant-for-work-we-dont-know-why-you-are-wanting-to-look-at-it-in-work-time!).

The Armory is a long-time host of various purity tests[1], which is probably why it's filtered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test

If you'd actually checked the site you'd know it wasn't NSFW.

They'd have to be able to access it to know that...

Can't forget https://stallman.org/ if we're talking about the 90s

Tbh I'll take that over any SPA that breaks my browser default behaviour.

My only complaint is it goes full wide screen. If he put a limit on the width the text expands to so it was readable on large screens that would be perfect.

No, the page layout is likely designed to be readable on anything that speaks HTTP. Including text-based browsers, mobile devices with low bandwidth and performance, screen readers, etc.

All you have to do to get the text width you want is resize your browser window.

None of those things are harmed by putting a maxwidth that limits the line length to something reasonable for the viewport size.

Have you ever met rms?

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...

for the uninitiated, you're looking for an audio file at the above link. you need to delete your HN referrer in order to do that because jwz is a "special" kind of adult.

For those who don't know how to do the above, simply open the link in a private window.

Or just copy it to the clipboard and paste.

Reminder / warning: jwz.org redirects incoming traffic from HN to an NSFW image.

You're spoiling the fun!

On second thought, I'd rather see the hairy nut in an egg cup than have to listen to RMS singing that.

The trouble is that everyone else's idea of "reasonable" is about 1/3 of what I want. You can all make your browsers narrower, but I've got no way to make your sites wider :(.

But then you have to resize it every time you visit a site that can actually make use of the full width, which is frustrating.

Man I miss backspacing through a URL and sometimes hitting an FTP page with files I wasn't necessarily supposed to be able to download. Halcyon days.

Pointing ftp client to blahblahblah.com was like a treasure hunt.

or just a browser with ftp://

Funny, my first dial-up ISP was halcyon.com (later Northwest Nexus/WinStar) in the Seattle area around 1999/2000. Halcyon days indeed!

Don't forget Larry Wall's page: http://www.wall.org/~larry/ :-)

OMG, I forgot about GeekCode :)

Maddox is a huge ass but his site is still updated from time to time

http://maddox.xmission.com/

He has posts from 1998 to 2020 but I'd say he still actively posts. He's just run out of things to say. lol

My gosh, I forgot about this one! Thanks for reminding me/us!

> I hope this never goes down.

I'm afraid it just has.

Perhaps it'll go up again eventually. In the meantime, the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230106230031/https://gail.com/

Cool to see the archive history for it! 6,520 captures, back to December 1998, which just has a parking page on it: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206131432/http://www.gail.c...

EDIT: Oh neat, the FAQ's changed over the years too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120119204931/http://gail.com/

Q: Gail, your website contains some pretty controversial stuff; aren't you worried about laws like SOPA being passed?

A: Yes, if SOPA passes, my little piece of the 'net could be blacklisted. This is why I urge you to please support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who will fight to protect your rights from the corporations who seem to have Congress in their pocket. Here’s a link to the EFF’s website where you can learn more: http://eff.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20130102160945/http://gail.com/

Q: Why isn't there any content here?

A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.

Q: Wow, you have a great website, can you suggest others like yours?

A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com

Q: Gail, what is your take on the CISPA bill?

A: Like SOPA and PIPA before it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) attempts to further errode our rights on the 'net. Also like SOPA and PIPA, we should do our best to inform ourselves and others, and kick this bit of evil to the curb before it can even come to a vote in Congress.

In short, CISPA is a very broad and loosly written law that allows any private company to give any and all data it has collected on you and give it to the government without any kind of judicial oversight. This is some seriously scary Orwellian stuff our own government is trying to implement, and it needs to be stopped.

To start educating yourself about what's going on, please read this great Wired article about the massive data center the NSA is building in Utah to house and data mine your personal data (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, credit card charges, etc.) This article was written by James Bamford, who literally wrote the book about the NSA back in the early eighties. Once you've read the article, head over to the Democracy Now website and watch the interview with William Binney, who worked for the NSA for almost forty years and provided Mr. Bamford with some of the information for his article. Want to help do something about this knuckle-headedness? Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and learn how to help.

(Both the CISPA and SOPA questions are gone by 2014 and replaced with the EFF "ad".)

The current state aside from traffic numbers seems to have come in around 2018-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20190127034732/https://gail.com/

> A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com

purple.com has since caved.

> I'm afraid it just has.

Nice work, everyone.

It definitely brings back a lot of memories.

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