Surf the web like it's 1999 | Hacker News Reader

Surf the web like it's 1999

billsworld.neocities.org

443 pointsthrowup238168 comments

If you set your HTTP proxy to "theoldnet.com" with port 1999, and add an exclusion for "web.archive.org", then all your web pages will come from 1999, via the Wayback Machine.

You can pick a different year by changing the port.

Edit: It may have been hugged to death...

I like https://oldweb.today ... actually emulates old OS/browser combinations and proxies stuff from archive.org

I never get over the weird feeling seeing something like Windows 95 which was released with such spectacle, Jay Leno and millions of dollars in launch events, requiring the latest available PC equipment to boot the same day, and of course the looming threat of the SPA sending you to PMITA prison if you didn’t pay your $209.95 being reduced to a small square on my mobile phone still running faster through a million layers of framework. Seemed like serious shit at the time.

Unfortunately it’s still Windows 95.

Not trying to be a hater, but I did recently install a Windows 95 VM on my Mac to relive that old experience… and then the very first error alert sound, that incredibly tinny really loud annoying sound that would always make me jump out of my chair with crappy PC speakers came blasting out of my much much better speakers backed by a subwoofer and I realized there is no nostalgia value to be had here.

I liked what I had at the time when it was all that I had but I would never want to completely relive that experience. If I got sent back in time to the day Windows 95 launched and had to live the rest of my life from that point on, I honestly don’t know if I would want to touch another computer until like early 1999, maybe late 1998 at the earliest, and only for work.

Well that’s sort of on you for not using the correct MPC 2.0 compatible Labtec speakers!

Same. It was around that time I discovered Linux, and then the *BSDs. Before that, getting online required Trumpet Winsock. I did some tech support for an ISP up until 1998, so I had to know the stack, but rarely touched it myself. From the mid-2000s I moved to Apple, but only because I wanted a laptop with a unix command line and working bluetooth and that was _hard_ back then.

Just realised that means I've not owned a Windows machine - and barely touched one professionally or even much in my personal life - in almost 25 years now.

https://youtu.be/13bs7oz4wp8?si=lx58N7UsdTXOD8D1

SPA (Software Publishers Association…and RIAA lawsuits…

It's so funny to see the SPA and RIAA being mentioned in the same context as PMITA prison because I just told my friend yesterday that if I ever released the software I actually want to build, that the RIAA and WMG would PMITA in court without so much as spitting on me in disgust before starting.

This really captures how slow the web, and everything else, was back then.

Not necessarily. I was living in Stockholm and had a 10/10Mbit connection. Not too bad for a 15 year old kid.

Nothing quite says Moore's law like putting the web in a website.

See also https://olduse.net/ for a 42 year delay on USENET. All I had to do was put this in my ~/.emacs file:

    (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "olduse.net" (nntp-port-number 11942)))

Then I typed `M-x gnus` and used the `^` key to see a listing of newsgroups.

i love the creativity people come up with for such novel things

Similarly check out https://protoweb.org/about/. They dont have every site, but they also include a fun 'antique' youtube where you get to stream with Real player or windows media player to bring back the 'greatness' of those products.

i'm excited to see if they properly recreated the "Buffering..."

Works nice in IE6, thanks!

In a few decades or so I could see setting that up for a nursing home so the residents could relive their youth.

Might also be good for a young kids pc.

Useful for dementia patients.

Yay! My old web page is there :O

https://theoldnet.com/get?url=www.shadow.net%2F%7Egiorgio%2F...

Awesome. Mine too. I was starting out https://theoldnet.com/get?url=brajeshwar.com

I miss this web :(

https://web.archive.org/web/20000407061146/http://www.x.com/

Does his proxy send x-forwarded-for header

You know these kinds of nostalgia capture an aesthetic, but what made the web special in 1999 was the voices of individuals publishing websites of their own… their movable type sites were usually high brow affairs, but ‘99 added LiveJournal and Blogger to the mix.

I really miss independent voices. I feel like social media is a hollow version of what was, kind of like a bowling alley with bumpers on the lane.

The web felt vital to expression in 1999, and today it usually doesn’t. It feels corporate. Wish we could find a way to recapture that feeling of connection with one another.

Agree entirely.

Let me share what revolutionized my tech experience.

#getoutside

Edit: Not being snarky, I’m totally serious. Online only goes so deep…then…nothing…

I have a different take. The opportunities were so wide-open that no one really knew what to do. There's a thing where if you restrict an artist, they're actually more creative. Where was Wordle in 1999?

Well for one, we were still using CGI scripts and for two, we didn't have local storage in the browser....

It could work with CGI scripts, we had enough JS, and we had cookies.

It was called Acrophobia and it was awesome.

For you younger members of the audience, this page is a great demonstration of how animated GIFs were originally used on the web and why a lot of us were so surprised when they made a big comeback in a totally different style in the 21st century.

I'm also amused by the fact that the file format GIF became a name for a snippet of animation, and you usually get a webp when you search for a GIF (for good reasons too, but funny nevertheless).

I've heard the specific old format pronounced 'GIF', whereas the newer general use case for any image format is pronounced 'GIF'

Everybody knows its always been pronounced ‘gif’.

> and you usually get a webp when you search for a GIF (for good reasons too, but funny nevertheless).

It's really unfortunate because animated webp is a shit format that should never have been created. There is no excuse for it lacking the same intra-frame compression present in the webm format it is based on.

Much better would have been to let the <img> tag and css pictures use (silent) video files and then add the missing features (loop flag, alpha, lossless compresion) to webm.

this is exactly how GIFs should have remained. The new generation calls these "stickers" which are all over Tiktok and Snapchat, and they're all Canva-made identikit garbage.

It's sad to think that GIFs that still remain are movie/TV scenes that are clipped to use as reactions to online comments.

> It's sad to think that GIFs that still remain

Those under thirty should be aware that this occurred because the owner of the GIF spec (H&R Block) began a legal strategy that caused most of us to move to JPEG.

Thanks for finally explaining stickers to me.

Websites were so easy to read and navigate back then.

It just worked. Some of the websites might be a bit rock and roll but there is a strange clarity to the whole thing.

I actually found https://www.seat61.com/ recently and it is this one dude who runs the greatest train website on the planet and he has been doing it since 2001. Site looks ancient but it is so useful.

Nothing but desktop computers were intended to display these, and so they could take advantage of the screen width. No desire to have them be an app either.

I love the idea and look forward to diving in. There's an anachronism in the first paragraph though... "check out my MySpace page"? MySpace didn't launch until 2003... Honest question, was this created by someone who was not actually on the web in 1999? Or maybe they're just taking artistic license with the "1999" idea?

For what it's worth, MySpace prior to officially being a social media site was created in '96 and officially launched as a internet network drive around 1999 cant remember the exact date, then was later sold to Murdoch and evolved more into a social media site later on but was already unofficially used as one. People shared music, short movies, porn. It didn't scale well as there was no de-duplication, files were stored in an EBCDIC database on a couple HP Surestore's which I and others upgraded a few times from 9TB to 18TB comprised of 4 and 9 GB drives, then eventually 18 GB drives.

That was XDrive. I don't think the name MySpace came around till the social network in 2003. The sale to Murdoch was 2005.

It was definitely Myspace in 1996+. Perhaps they didn't start marketing the brand until 1999? I had to register about 50 variants of that domain name in 99' for them using the all so much fun email template with Internic. As to what relationships they had with other companies I have no clue. The HP SureStore's left the dataceter in 2002 or 2003. I met their CEO in 1999 when they were going to launch the drive space feature. As a fun side note they were the only customer I was ever allowed to let into the datacenter.

Some of the domain variants were MyLinuxSpace, MyBSDSpace, MyWindowsSpace and so on...

The founder of MySpace came from XDrive so I assumed XDrive is what is being referred to here. Wikipedia suggests this too, with MySpace starting later as a new company, but it states that the early team were inspired by social features in some other existing software. Maybe that was called MySpace and is what you are talking about. Would love to read more about it

Startups were a little odd back then. Some would be in the process of changes but the employees wouldn't know until they pulled the trigger. I am just guessing but maybe you saw the exit stage of XDrive and I saw the entry of Myspace but there was some hush-hush secret overlap. It certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing I saw back then.

Was this just like s/ftp accounts? Or something more complex like a 1996 dropbox? It was a mounted filesystem in your machine?

It was a drive letter mounted on your Windows machine or a mount point on Linux. I forgot what protocol was used and I never personally used it as I had my own SFTP servers. On Windows people would run an app but I think it was just mounting a SMB drive. I only handled the backend storage, HP-UX servers and DNS for them. Other people managed the Windows servers and their company managed the applications.

Neat. I was 10 back then but I remember having to deal with IPX networking to play Warcraft 1-2 with my dad, and over Mplayer, or some sort of online game service IIRC. Never really thought about how you'd do a mounted network share back then. IPX was a pain but we had no idea what we were doing back then.

edit: Oh duh, battlenet.. sigh, my how blizzard has changed.

I'm going to take a guess this was FUSE.

More likely to be WebDAV, which was the 'great hope' for cloud storage before it was called cloud.

FUSE was 2004, so it's anyone's guess.

Yeah, also everything loads too fast. And maybe too many colors (too high a bit-depth).

By 1999, most would have been on 24-bit color, or "millions of colors" as Apple called it. Most images are still 24-bit today.

Looking at his neocities (self made) profile, he's 45-50.

https://billsworld.neocities.org/profile/

The favorites also has a Dr Who page that features David Tennent and Freema Agyeman, who didn't appear on the show until 2006.

Yeah except it's known that they can travel through time and space, so that one makes sense.

99% odds artistic license.

1% odds anything else.

It's better that way. The feel of 1999 was there in 1998 and yes, the distant future, the year 2000.

Was going to say that Friendster is not as cool, but only just realized it came out the same year as MySpace did... whoa

And Tomoyasu Hotei didn't release "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" (the autoplaying MIDI) until 2000 ;)

Laughing hard at the Olean ad. As many won't get that, it's the brand name for Olestra, a fat substitute with similar nutritional qualities but zero calories because humans can't digest it, that was briefly popular in low-calorie foods in the late 90s. But since you can't digest it, it leads to horrible shits and was mostly taken off the market.

The official phrase was "causes anal leakage".

¡Olé Olestra! https://web.archive.org/web/19981201183830/http://www.zug.co...

that phrase is much much much worse than the black box labeling the FDA can require you to use.

once that phrase hit the late night stand up bits, it was pretty much over. it's just sad it had to make to that far.

Having read about the Internet in magazines since its launch in India (Aug 15, 1999), the first thing I did on the first day I landed in a city with the Internet was going to a cybercafé[1] to create my Yahoo! and Hotmail ID in 1999. I still own the Hotmail ID but lost the Yahoo! Re-taking back the Hotmail ID was also a nice story from the past. ;-)

My recollections of the actual events could be clearer, but here it goes. I started with Blogspot[2] before Google bought it. It had no commenting options. A Russian developer contacted me to try his commenting script, which works with Blogspot. I'm either the only person or part of a few people using it. He helped me set up, and we emailed regularly, and that's how comments started on my website. I let go of my comments recently (they are in the 5-figures after removing spam.) I searched my blog but I either deleted it or have forgotten the name of the program that powered it but it was a good thing. Thanks to another nice person on the Internet.

Then, Blogger to Movable Type to WordPress (before it even had options to create pages). Now, I'm in "plain-text".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_café

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)

For probably nostalgic reason, this put a big smile on my face.

But for those who are under 30s, or may be under 25s. What do you think of it? Ugly? Interesting? Boring? or what? Interested to know.

You mean under 25. Otherwise the would probably remember win 95 onwards. I somehow like it more, but could be nostalgia of a time when anything a display showed was magical. I wanted more but didn’t know what. I think these UIs leave some work for the imagination, cartoonish in a way. Now they are too business

Pretty accurate, except for one major thing: all the pages load instantly. In 1999 you pretty much expected each web page to take at least 10 seconds to load, mostly for the images to gradually...fade...into.....view.

I remember a very specific rastering effect with loading images, probably around 1994-1996? The image would load every nth line and then iteratively nth line + i until i==n. Compared to what I would see later (just loading in every line from top to bottom), you could get a sense of the whole image sooner, just in an increasing fraction of the vertical resolution. I can't recall which image type this was or whether it was Mosaic or Navigator, but the effect was very distinct; at the time I assumed it was the way the image data was streamed in, but now I'm wondering whether it was just the way the image codec built the viewable bitmap.

I think this was progressive JPEGs

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/website/improving-websit...

Nice demo: https://pooyak.com/p/progjpeg/

Interlaced GIFs. Early browsers only rendered the single lines as they came in (leaving the unloaded parts blank), but eventually browsers started doubling the lines so the image seemed to increase in resolution as it loaded. I think MSIE started the latter behavior, and that's what modern browsers do.

Progressive JPEGs are somewhat similar, but IIRC didn't gain traction until 2000 or so.

GIF supports this too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing

That was interlaced GIF, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing (the demo image in the article is from Chrome which tries to approximate the image with rectangular regions, the 1990s browsers showed not yet received lines as blank which made interlacing effect)

Progressive PNGs added a 2d variant of this, but almost nobody ever used it, because it made the image take longer to load.

For me, the “https” in the Netscape URL is sort of an anachronism. I mean, yes, technically it was available in Netscape in 1999, but very few sites used it (even among e-commerce sites).

I remember the first ProLiant server we flipped to support SSL had to have an add-in card to accelerate the encryption based on the traffic we handled. It was something like this: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04283920.PDF?jumpid=in_pb-psn...

In terms of load speed, the period between introduction of broadband and the rise of SPA was heaven.

Absolutely--I'd click a link, and it would feel like the page had already been in memory.

SPA?

It's what people who didn't understand the separation of concerns with HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server side were did by deciding to jam it all into JavaScript and entangle it in code complete and gang of four constructs and then call it superior, easy, efficient, well designed, robust ... It's ... It's simply wild.

HTML content? In the javascript. Style information? In the javascript. A way to negotiate network loading and resources, document structure? You guessed it. Want the back button to work again? More JavaScript. URLs to be universal? Even more!

Eventually you'll get the page to be almost as functional as it would have been by default had you not used any of it.

Read the mdn and w3c documentation guys, I promise you 99.9% of what you want is in there without reinventing it from base principles. It's not 2010 anymore

It's like a bad cook who is trying to fix a poorly made meal by making more mistakes, covering it in salt and oil, smearing honey over it, and calling it delicious.

Single Page Applications. The spaghetti mess of JavaScript-heavy monstrosities that replaced the web.

Single-page application. SPAs became popular once JS had matured enough to generate all the HTML for the page.

Hear hear

I'm thought the Netscape logo only animated when the page was loading? I found myself instinctively hitting the stop button to try and make the logo stop looping.

Overall, it's really great though. I love the stuff popping up on Neocities.

Quite a while ago, someone (jwz?) brought back the original Netscape home page circa 1994, complete with dialup-level speed throttling. It "feels" like 56K to me, but I believe 9600-14.4K would have been more common at the time.

http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

I first used the net at work in the mid 90s, where we had a T1 and pages were light by modern standards. It was peppy with a Mac IIci.

Veteran of the browser wars here. So many (good) feelings checking this website… I loved that era’s internet.

Incidentally my spotify started playing songs I used to download via Napster so I’m now 100% nostalgic.

Related: https://www.my90stv.com/

Watch TV from the 90s.

I love this site. It is using YouTube embeds, but it doesn't show any ads, which would ruin the retro experience. I wonder if that's just my adblocker though.

Might as well listen to music like its 1999 likes you are at it.

https://webamp.org/

It really whips the llama's @$$!

The website is wellmade and cool and stuff, but I am a bit tired of these all-quirky-in-the-same-way retro 1990s geocities homages...

Nostalgia comes from forgetting that we got tired of these all-quirky-in-the-same-way retro 1990s geocities homages in the 1990's.

> Nostalgia comes from . . .

Or from remembering the Angelfire/MySpace DIY aesthetic from before the world became consumption-only and flatly Material.

See also: https://wiby.me, search engine for such websites.

> See also: https://wiby.me, search engine for such websites.

Thanks for reminding me about this! So much of the older information is lost using modern search engines. Even when I use the date range feature, I don't turn up the pages Wiby does.

I had been using Yandex for searching older content but now I've added Wiby (right click inside its search form) to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...

From the little experience in web design I have, my opinion is that what killed the joy of web design were smartphones. Before screen size fragmentation you could just have a sidebar because everyone had the screen width to see it. You could just put two drilling workmen gifs and a huge under construction gif in the middle and everyone would be able to see it the way you designed it. Now you can't count on that anymore, which would be a bit of a problem if we were talking about JUST having a desktop design and a mobile design, but that's not how it works these days.

Fluid, responsive design is sheer insanity to me. In principle, it makes perfect sense, but HTML is EXTREMELY inadequate at supporting this paradigm. You literally can not have a design that is minimal for mobile devices and then unfolds into glorious fixed width sidebars, because you MUST include the HTML for the sidebar in the mobile version and hide it with CSS black magic if you want it to unfold on wide screens, which means now the mobile version which should be as slim as possible is bloated with HTML it won't use, or you'll have to dynamically load the sidebar with javascript for desktop, which means the desktop version can't work without javascript enabled even though you're only using it make the sidebar it should have by default appear.

I feel like many problems could be solved if we just replaced HTML with something else.

Sadly nobody says "surf the web" any more

Nor the "world wide web", ask the younger ones what www stands for and they get really confused.

If you notice nowadays all websites use just https:// rather than https://www.

And good riddance, there was never a good reason for using www. in the first place and with SRV records to direct other services to different IPs if needed it makes even less sense.

It's also been quite some time since I've heard anyone talking about the "information superhighway".

That was a Microsoft term, Bill Gates wrote a book about it in 1994, and then wrote a second edition a year later replacing the phrase with "internet".

Or cyberspace

Even the information superhighway has gone out of fashion.

See also https://simulator.money/play for a Windows XP nostalgia trip

That game seems cool, but it's a bit buggy and unfinished. Are there any similar games (as in personal finances simulation) that are more complete and stable? Obviously the game does not need to simulate a Windows XP computer ;)

So realistic. BSOD when I try to open the start menu.

I appreciate the effort to make images load at what feels like 56k speeds.

i wonder how many people will actually try to use ctrl-alt-delete to recover. i did just to see if it would do anything, but i don't use windows so I wasn't going be rick rolled by it.

like it would be funny if it launched a full screen window of the start up screen for win98 or something.

I wish there was a bit more latency. Everything is way to smooth!

I miss those "under construction" gifs.

Enjoy: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Sadly it's missing the Dunder Mifflin animation: http://ohiogunlawyer.com/

Friends don't let friends use anything but web safe colors. Everyone else can enjoy dithering on their 8-bit CRT

Using the correct, non-antialiased fonts would go a long way.

CRTs did a lot of heavy lifting in anti-aliasing those fonts.

1999? I was ready to get off the web in 1999. How about surfing the web like it's 1994!

I agree, Mosaic was groundbreaking but when Netscape 0.9 launched in the fall of 1994 was like waking up in another century.

Or we could go back to 1991 with IRC, Archie+FTP, and Telnet BBS's on Wyse terminals or SparcStations. I'm very nostalgic for that era.

IMO Netscape 3.04g was the peak browser experience - and by far peak performance.

I remember when a friend who ran a business out of his basement got a T1 installed in 1997. Myself and several other friends were there the day Verizon hooked up the local loop. I did the first test on a desktop windows95 machine with Netscape 3. I typed "cnn.com", hit enter and BAM! the entire page loaded and rendered instantly before you could blink an eye. I fell out of my chair. On dialup it would take about almost a minute to download all the images.

Once Netscape 4 hit it was a slow downhill path of bloat. I have not been able to replicate that instant rendering experience since then.

Wyse terminals! I had my first programming courses at university in those. I remember dumping core and somehow sending the core file to a classmate's screen, and they had to stare at the screen beeping for a while.

Now I teach those courses at the same university. Those terminals are long gone. This week we had a coding exam and students were coding with their laptops. They are forbidden from checking the Internet, sharing folders, and using AI assistance, but I'm sure some of them did because it's impossible to watch their every move. The exam would be fairer if we still had the Wyse terminals!

My nostalgia is mostly for the Bitnet chatrooms from the mid-80s. Especially the "hot tub channel". I didn't know it was possible to be that lascivious in plain text!

Must've been fun browsing all 2,278 web sites[1] on Mosaic 2.x.

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

Gotta find someone with a WinSock disk and a browser for your Windows 3.11 for Workgroups install first. Fortunately I was in college at the time, so there were plenty.

Oh man, posting screenshots of your desktop brings me back.

It was waasy more interesting back when actually methods for OS customization existed beyond “favorite color” we’ve really lost so much.

I never had that complicated of a setup but still found it fun

https://www.deviantart.com/donatj/art/Screenshot-9-of-Mine-i...

The word "blog" seems like a giveaway this isn't from a real archive. I don't remembering hearing it until years later.

The first thing I remember reading that could be described as a blog would be John Carmack's .plan file that he frequently updated with his progress on Quake development. This could be retrieved using a dedicated "finger" program, but I seem to remember that mIRC also had the ability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

Excerpt: "The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory. Often this file (maintained by the user) contains either useful information about the user's current activities, similar to micro-blogging, or alternatively all manner of humor."

Apparently the term 'blog' was coined in 1999, and Blogger was launched later that same year, so it actually is possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History

I mean, there's a "Covid-19" badge in the middle of the bottom row.

The power off button on the monitor does not work.

If I type "http://yahoo.com/" in the address bar, it does not work as expected.

Clicking on the Netscape Navigator logo works, but if I type the same address, "www3.netscape.com" manually into the address bar, it does not work.

The URL in the address bar isn't updated.

> The power off button on the monitor does not work.

Seeing that CRT my first urge was to push the degauss button. Not working either.

No real web without ICQ.

All my contacts online and offline were in ICQ. If anything represents the pre 2k web it's ICQ.

Back then it even displayed your IP address and people could nuke you (DOS today) if you were doing bad things or shit talking.

Also the mentality of people was a lot friendlier and collegial and forgiving for human emotions and craziness.

This is pretty fun but it doesn't seem like the URL bar ever updates? Even though this are all real pages.

This feels like a madeleine de Proust: simpler times, so much left to discover. We ruined it

Oh snap, I forgot about Tom. Good to see he's still 30 and hanging out in Santa Monica.

I haven't been able to find the " π " symbol. Has anyone else spotted it?

Doesn't have a modem/ethernet icon in the tray to connect/disconnect and see traffic? I always looked for the blinking... and only now realized that I haven't had that for years. When did that go out of style?

No JS framework, no NPM, no AJAX, and so on. The web was so simple, and so was life.

The earliest DRM I can remember are those sites that blocked you from selecting text or right-clicking.

No boats, no lights, no motorcars. Not a single luxury.

No humans, just trees and dinosaurs. That's the life I want now.

wrong analogy. Come up with something relevant

We aint so quaint, we're just technologically impaired!

I've never been able to find my old geocities account. I'm pretty sure I remember the neighborhood/number correctly.

It was an ultima online and final fantasy 7 cheats webpage haha

It's funny because it's true.

Instantly took me back to the late 90s. I remember trying to optimize images for 16k colors, and dealing with all the weird, disparate javascript versions.

16k colors, man! You must have been rich to be able to afford a machine being able to display all of these ;)

I optimized for the official 216 color Web Safe Palette (“How many shades of neon green do we really need?”) well into the early 2000s.

216! Yes! I has totally blocked memories about that. I think I built my first website in 1997, and it was wild what we had to do back then.

Or, god forbid, the intrusions that VBScript made on the web.

Once you get that html table as layout are not harmful, that you use properly the border enabling attribute, augment the noscript/basic (x)html with <audio> and <video>.

Well...

In 1999 websites were a little more modern compared to the early 90s. By 2000 there were many online gaming communities already. The BSOD is so realistic though :D

GeoCities/Angelfire sites looked like this at least until 2004 when blogs took off. As CMS architecture was a lot more complicated than static HTML/CSS, people stopped customizing their sites and just went with default themes.

That was the magic of early Internet. No themes, no frameworks, just whatever you could do with HTML.

First of all, A BIG THANKS TO YOU MAN! this thing blew mind and I discovered a new site. This is like unlocking a new map for me.

My mobile screen has way higher resolution than 15" monitor from 1999. I can fit multiple Netscape's on my screen.

Very nice! The first brief I give my students when teaching web development is similar - Web design like it’s 1999

Missed a detail! It should be an IE4 (or so) window half obscured by a stack of junk "toolbars".

Pretty authentic. I love the blue links in black background - today a accessibility nightmare.

That's what sealed the deal for me. That and the animated GIFs of ladies.

I miss the optimism of that era. I don't miss the weekly family beatings though.

Oh how that Soundblaster midi vibe takes me back.

This brings so much nostalgia and joy

That Cyber-bear looks familiar...

It was so much better.

Is it just me or is the address bar never updating even though the site changes?

I already surfed the web (and built websites) in all of 1999. Not even misplaced nostalgia would make me want to go back and surf the web like 1999 again. I’ll keep my modern browser, CSS Grid, and 1 Gigabit Fiber Optic line thank you very much.

Surf the web like it's 1999. And all the images load instantly. Yeah, that wasn't what it was like!

And altavista.com doesn't even load!

What makes the nostalgia misplaced?

Nostalgia is the opiate of the elderly.

Taking small sips before you get truly wizened is sometimes harmless, which I think is the case here.

Too big a sip leads to yelling at clouds.

Nostalgia is for good things. I surfed the web for the entirety of 1999. It wasn't good.

I have plenty of fond memories of browsing the web in the late 90s as a teenager: things like huddling around the glow of the CRT with a friend playing Yahoo pool, printing out absurdly long gamefaqs for the RPGs of the era, and keeping up with the latest happenings in Ultima Online on UO Stratics.

The technology was not the best, but there were a ton of great things on the web of that era. I don’t yearn for a return to that ecosystem but reserve the right to remain sentimental about it.

I'm not convinced that it is much better in this decade:

- paywalls & 'login to see more'

- autoplaying videos that follow you whn you're just trying to read an article

- cookie banners

- artificial loading throbbers

- horrible intrusive tracking

- an advertising corporation also has the near-monopoly on browsing

- we have more bandwidth but apparently need 5Mb of javascript just to render text

- mobile first design, meaning much lower information density

- walled gardens like discord, facesbook, twitter, reddit storing content in inaccessible, unarchivable form

There were problems then but there were fewer headaches and fewer exhausting battles just to stay sane.

- content farms that wreck the signal to noise ratio, getting much much worse with "AI" now

- unchecked astoturfing and referral-laundering "reviews"

- everyone being on walled gardens that restrict what can be hosted (both content and format)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com