Internet Artifact Museum | Hacker News Reader

Internet Artifact Museum

neal.fun

338 pointsmeetpateltech71 comments

Note that many of the artifacts are interactive: buttons and links are clickable (effectful within the museum, does not leave page), text is scrollable, videos play, etc

Fantastic work.

That explains why I couldn't see LOL (lol!)

Try the Napster download button. Love it.

I was like cool! But then...

Totally worth it!

I'm virtually certain the audio clip that plays when you connect to AOL Dial-Up is not a modem from 1991. To my ear it sounds like a 28.8 or 33.6 modem

flips table

@Begin(Comic Book Guy) worst website ever @End

Well, it says connected at 52kbps... and the handshake was pretty short, I think it may be a 56k accelerated handshake that could happen if the line characteristics were similar to a previous call. Not sure if that's in all of x2/kflex/v.90/v.92, but it's in some of them.

14.4kbps club, checking in...

Everything this neal.fun -guy does is golden.

His last HN forey [password game] left me bureaucratic for weeks.

They should add to the emoji page a blurb about them also being called "emoticons." I remember a big debate about this, and we collectively decided to call them emojis.

Also, the helicopter game was going around on DOS well before 2002. I was playing that around 1993 on a Gateway 386.

Emoji and emoticons are not the same thing.

Emoticons are things like :) or :D which can be done purely in ASCII. Emoji are actual pictures.

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

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

They were the same thing at one time. "Emoticons" came first.[1] When someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture, there was a debate about whether they should be called emoticons or emojis. Emoji won out.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/happy-30th-birthday-emoti...

> When someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture, there was a debate about whether they should be called emoticons or emojis

[citation needed].

The history of the word emoji isn't some mysterious thing - the wikipedia article linked in your parent post has it all laid out.

Emoji is a Japanese word meaning pictograph, it isn't derived from the word 'emoticon'. They were developed by Japanese phone companies as an idiomatic expressive addition to Japanese writing, not because 'someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture'. There was no time when they might have ended up being called emoticons.

Yeah, I'm not saying emoji came from emoticon. I'm saying some people called them emoticons, and others called them emojis. At some point, we there was a debate about it on the internet (when the internet was much smaller), and the collective decision was to call them emojis.

I'm citing myself as a primary source because I was there when it happened.

Right - the fact that Emoji and Emoticons share the first 3 letters is a complete coincidence; The word Emoji is a portmanteau of the Japanese words É (絵; picture) and Moji (文字; letters).

I don’t have a citation but I remember Yahoo! Chat calling them emoticons.

"Emoticon" used to be the general term and was also often applied to smileys in forums (which are more closely related to the kind of custom "emojis" you still find in places like Slack or Twitch). In those cases the term has definitely been superceded by "emoji" but this is due to them being hard to distinguish from real Unicode emojis.

"Emoticon" refered to symbol combinations. "Emoji" only arrived on the scene in the English-speaking world via Unicode. I think I've heard both terms being used to refer to kaomojis (CJK symbol combinations) before that but I'm not sure. The only change I'm aware of is that smileys already present in Unicode via extended ASCII are now sometimes also referred to as "emojis" although they technically aren't. They were never called emoticons though and emoticons are generally not called "emojis".

I recommend https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L6SI74U/ref=kinw_myk_ro...

It seems like some people are claiming emoticons are retroactively emoji because emoji is the term people know now.

I loved that game. Played it on my 8086 with CGA graphics in the early 1990s.

Check this out:

> Chopper Commando, a DOS game written by Mark Currie using Turbo Pascal in 1990

https://blog.loadzero.com/blog/chopper258/

After learning that his experiment had gone awry, Morris asked a friend to anonymously relay an apology and instructions for removing the worm to internet users

I'm like 80% sure this friend was Paul Graham.

They are missing Altavista, Stick Figure Death, and a few more.

And telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Is that the star wars movie?

Yep! You got it!

CMU's Internet Confessional Booth was great reading, too.

I recall there was a dropdown for confessing "fish in microwave", which was the original sin that inspired the CMU grad students who created it.

Here's Bennet Yee's old page at CMU (last update 4 April 1996) with a link to it and other classic stuff, but it's long gone and not in the internet archive:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/bsy/www/fun.html

FJ!!! was way ahead of the curve in 1998 with his fuzzy PHKL: Pink Hello Kitty Laptop.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212120420/http://www.exonom...

Buffy's Swearing Keyboard

https://www2.b3ta.com/buffyswear/

VRML, MIDI players,

Maybe the Museum accepts donations of artifacts.

"The Whitehouse Page"

I had to read that to ensure it was talking about Whitehouse.gov and not Whitehouse.com - the latter of which fooled many-a-schoolteacher in the 90s.

I had that thought too! I double checked the URL. I remember my friends trying desperately to convince me to go to the .com and I refused because they were so obviously suspicious.

Please add SomethingAwful and 4chan :)

needs moar yellow van https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkAngvkWVkk

> 4chan

In that vein, I would have expected 2ch[1] to be included in the list of artifacts. 2ch inspired 2chan[2], which inspired 4chan later. 2ch is an enormous anonymous bulletin board system that was home to many communities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba_Channel

definitely seems very like in the post-2000s section, especially considering the exponential growth of the internet (that it itself alludes to), it seems to focus a lot more on the pre-2000 content, with a small handful of misc stuff from after.

I with the website used proper URLs so it would be possible to use permalinks as a reference for individual items...

Good news for you - it does (for some parts).

Once you reach the Internet era, you can copy/paste the links within the embedded browser to access them directly. e.g.: https://internet-artifacts.neal.fun/sites/y2k/index.html

I think they meant linking to the museum itself, at a specific artifact. Not the embed itself.

It's also using a color scheme that's almost unreadable here with dark reader. Will check again in the morning lol

> The reaction to the [first spam] email was overwhelmingly negative: one user claimed it broke his computer system, and the US Defense Communications Agency called his company to complain. >>Thuerk claims he sold $13 to $14 million worth of mainframe computers through the campaign<<.

(>>emphasis mine<<)

It was truly a sign of things to come, and an answer to why we can't have nice things.

I hate to be that guy, but the smiley/emoticon was invented on the PLATO platform circa 1972

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPjEJH...

The CDC hardware platform didn't adapt to personal computing architectures, but many of the PLATO alumnus went on to futures with PARC and Apple.

This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.

They're actually overstrikes of existing characters! The PLATO terminal had some wack stuff built into it, courtesy, I suspect, of the vector buffers it was initially designed with. That kind of computational overhead limited the expansion of the system into commodity equipment, a definite cloud of doom.

We can really, really go down the rabbit hole with encoding. Wireless morse had several equivalents to "emoticons" in its text encoding, and typesetters had zillions of different emoticons they could and did fabricate. Indeed, these are the first documented examples.

PLATO is an oddball system, pre-ASCII, pre-everything. That overstrike trick kind of hints at that. So if we mean ASCII-encoded emotions, yeah, PLATO loses to CM's BBS circa 1982.

Link broken. But I read about Plato in that book the Happy Orange Glow or something like it. Didn't make it all the way through but it sounded groundbreaking

The Friendly Orange Glow

The author also had an article on PLATO emoticons as the book was in development: http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2012/09/plato-emoticons-rev...

Ars did a really great overview of the system back in March.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/plato-how-an-educati...

It's incredible what they got out of those CDC machines. I wish I had the EE skills to figure out how they did it. I suspect that the vacuum tubes might have yielded some compute capabilities far beyond transistors of the era, given the very high power levels you can get in tubes. But I don't know. It might just be very open-ended approaches to memory registers, or simply letting the plasma display do its own thing rather than wipe it back to its initial state.

Man reading through the early 2000s part made me sad. The internet isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be.

No "Punch the Monkey"?

https://twitter.com/meyerweb/status/1454563559577370635?lang...

Even if it doesn't the internet has seen more than enough of its share of monkeys being spanked ;)

When you get to Napster (1999), be sure to interact with it and download a song.

In the middle of the ARPANET map at the beginning, there's a node right in the middle called "SCOTT". I tried Googling for what this node was and didn't come up with much. Why was the node called Scott? Was it run by a guy named Scott? Or is that an acronym for some institution?

If it's a person, how and why did Scott have a PDP-11?

Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, perhaps?

Helicopter game! I'd forgotten about that.

Club Penguin. I was so very very happy when that shut down. I - and others - were doing Support at wordpress.com. Kids (I assume) constantly exploiting other kids to get into their accounts. Kids doing anything to get traffic, using popunder scripts and more.

Helicopter game gave me flashbacks. IIRC my high score was around 44,000.

ALong side that I'd hall of fame a "3d pong" game which was available only in "Macromedia shockwave". Impossible to even find a screenshot of it now, it was beautiful 3d for its time.

https://archive.org/details/curveball_flash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrAsGKR72YA

Wow, that's some good knowledge, I think that was it, or at least in the same style.

Need to add Mahir - I Kiss You!

Yes, I came here to add this. That was the biggest thing missing for me; 2nd, Altavista.

I love this, plenty of things I'd forgotten about in there presented in a way non-needs like me (us) might appreciate too.

I think there should be an every l entry for ICQ.

Doesn't work on my phone, the top half of the "slides" are cut off. (My phone probably belongs in a museum, though...)

I think HN should come up with its own Internet Artifact Museum :)

I'm happy to collab if folks want to.

Man, I'm really feeling the enshitification of the internet right now. Those early to mid years were great.

1989 and 1991 seem to be on the wrong tabs. It looks like they traded places.

And its a single page app.

Waves and waves of nostalgia <3 thanks, this is wonderful

Reminds of how slack was/is an IRC clone

No not really irc, more of a spiritual descendent of Habitat, and a direct descendent of two other online massively multiplayer games and also Flickr, developed by Stewart Butterfield:

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) (stanford.edu):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37977632

https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_W...

I posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37978755

DonHopkins 3 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

Stewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game called "Game Neverending":

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending

It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system.

That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought.

Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)

https://www.glitchthegame.com/

That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".

favicon should really be netscape navigator

i always loved seeing stuff like this. it's a pretty neat.

Well done !!!

"In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the initial proposal for the World Wide Web, envisioning it as a "universal linked information system" to help researchers share information."

Statement of Facts

Idea: Let's use this system to disseminate advertising.

Idea: Let's use this system to run code automatically on peoples' computers.

Idea: Let's use this system as a means for people to communicate with their family and friends over the internet by uploading their "private" messages to a third party's website.

Idea: ???

Universal linked information system --> universal internet surveillance system

Question

Is the web still suitable to help researchers share information if so-called "tech" companies intermediate access to all information and seek to commercialise all web use.

> Is the web still suitable to help researchers share information if so-called "tech" companies intermediate access to all information and seek to commercialise all web use.

Yes, plenty of researchers share information via the web.

There was some original vision for the web, and of course that vision has changed in the past 30 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com