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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Man I miss the old internet. It was a wild adventure around every corner with a huge diversity of tech and self hosted everything.

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Same. I'm sitting here nostalgic for the days when I'd stay up late on my parents' computer talking to God knows who on AOL, reading about black boxes and phreaking in very vanilla sources, and learning how to write progs in VB back in the day. Oh the excitement when I got in the Winsock beta and now my whole OS had Internet connectivity. It was great times.

VB progz are literally at the root of the origin story behind I'm even here, now, writing this comment on this website. Seriously changed my life by compelling me to find an answer to the question "how did they build this?", which led me to coding. 25 years later and here I am.

Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.

> AOHell

Early gateway drug for me too.

> “how did they build this?”

I feel like this is the absolute distilled essence of this site and its visitors.

There's dozens of us!

Here's an old thread some of you guys might have missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001916

Dan Applemans guide to the Win32 API and some bas files really kickstarted things. {S /con/con. I think I’ve still got ancient copies around here. Time to browse lenshellprogarchive.com.

Me too! It was aol punters and vb proggies that were my first push into programming and here I am all these years later.

I miss the content of the old Internet, but I do not miss its tech.

Web design in general was garbage. Not just the good kind of garbage, with funky animations and weird colors, but horrible typography, unreadable fonts, zero accessibility, horizontal scrollbars everywhere, images used as text, misaligned tables, no math typesetting, no videos, and no interactive content without installing more garbage like Flash, ActiveX, or Java.

When writing server-side stuff, your options were basically Perl/CGI, and later PHP, both of which are insecure trash that makes today's JavaScript look sane by comparison.

The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".

Perl's Taint mode made it more secure than most languages, including today's. Other languages later ran into the same security bugs that had been fixed in Perl a decade before.

I wouldn't go that far. Perl's got a very simplistic view of a tainted value with no context of usage. An untainted value will be fine for example for embedding in html, but not for SQL queries, paths, mongo queries, json strings, shell downs, etc. The protection/checks you get from it are really minimal in practice in comparison to Sonar and similar analysers.

Ruby also had tainted values and dropped them recently https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16131

The simplicity is what I liked about taint mode - it didn’t purport to make anything safe for any particular context, you had to do that yourself. It just tracked strings that came in from outside Perl to make sure they didn’t get sent outside Perl again without being run through a regex. My main critique is that you don’t always want to use a regex to check safety, sometimes you want to try properly parsing a value before handing it off to another system. So in various places I’d end up untainting with a dot star regex.

>The average modern blog is a masterpiece of readability, usability, and frontend/backend engineering, compared to almost anything seen on the web during its "golden age".

Eh, maybe. There's a lot more scrolling, sure. And whizzy CSS tricks to make things rotate and gradients and whatever. And you can download a coolio new font so the site looks like it was typed on a 1932 Royal typewriter with a crooked arm on the "G" key.

But then I go to something like the OpenBSD site, and I remember how much I liked the simplicity of Ye Olden Tymes.

Back in the bad old times, there was no problem getting something centered when using tables. CSS only got that working reliably 17 minutes ago. And while making your page look like a brochure with invisible GIFs and table layouts was kinda heavy, we've replaced it with 100MB of Javascript and an embedded WASM running Emacs.

If we had to run the modern Web on dial-up, we'd all be dead before Reddit loaded.

> If we had to run the modern Web on dial-up, we'd all be dead before Reddit loaded.

Well, we don't. That's a big reason why it exists today and didn't back then.

> There's a lot more scrolling, sure. And whizzy CSS tricks to make things rotate and gradients and whatever. And you can download a coolio new font so the site looks like it was typed on a 1932 Royal typewriter with a crooked arm on the "G" key.

What are you talking about? That description doesn't match 99% of blogs. In fact, rotating things and gradients were a staple of the old web, not the current one.

> Back in the bad old times, there was no problem getting something centered when using tables.

Cool. Except it only works on a standard sized desktop screen. And good luck using such a site if you are vision impaired and need assistive technologies. "Bad old times" indeed.

I miss it too. We've lost so much. Anytime I find a self hosted web page with very basic html, I get excited.

I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design. The thinking being, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

God bless Japan.

> I learned that there's a whole corner of the web where Japan never left web 1.0 design.

Examples?

See https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...

It is amazing that almost 10 years have passed since this article, but the example web sites are still more or less the same.

Can I ask why you put “self hosted” and “web 1.0 design together” so tightly? I self host a blog, and several apps, which are modern and full of JavaScript.

I guess I’m not disagreeing - I also miss Web 1.0 - but combining the two seems like throwing the baby with the bath water. Can we have self hosted AND modern?

I can't speak for the person you reply to, but for me, I get a certain easy, comfortable feeling when I see something that looks like a GOOD basic 90s site. I don't mean the stereotypical spinning GIFs and whatever -- but if I see thoughtfully-presented content using nothing more than the default font, blue links (purple if I cliked it!), maybe some <hr> tags to help with organization a bit, and I see "Last Updated: 2023-xx-xx", I feel like I'm in very good company.

(but I do appreciate some effort to constrain the page margins. :) )

Textured background optional...

Andrew Odlyzko's website is much in this style: <https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/>

Hal Varian's UC Berkeley pages as well: <https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.h...>

Both of those are highly info-dense to boot, and load near-instantly.

I miss cgi-bin urls after form submission.

Much of the old internet is still there, just outside the walled gardens of the modern internet.

A good place to view them is r/forgottenwebsites on Reddit, sort by top of all time. Choose one and then follow the links on those pages to other websites and "surf." Its a fun pasttime.

edit it seems that Angelfire is still live, so you can view sites made on that

that was a fun rabbit hole, thanks haha.

But hey, at least we have a great JavaScript ecosystem now, right guys? Right? Sigh. I too miss the good old days.

While I too miss the old internet, more the pre-AOL-participating internet.

It's been steadily downhill ever since, and worth noting that it's now so awful even the late 90s/early 2000s look like utopia in hindsight.

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

You and me too sibling. We really lost something.

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