The Telegarden (1995-2004)
goldberg.berkeley.edu
goldberg.berkeley.edu
The Telegarden was incredible! I read about it in a book about interesting places on the internet, which my dad bought for me shortly after we got our first home computer on the web, around 1996. I believe it was shortly after the Garden was moved from Berkeley to the AEC.
The incredible feeling of clicking a button in a webpage, waiting a few minutes, and then seeing the result of a robot's movement 5,000 miles away was just mindblowing.
The Telegarden was my first chat room, first 'social' account, and first human interaction online. Amazingly, tending the garden became less exciting than getting to know all of these interesting people from around the world. It was a unique community like I want to imagine still exists in tiny pockets of the old web.
Those robotic arms don't sell for tooooo terribly much used now. Someday I'd love to try replicating the site, though I don't know if it's possible to have that same social experience on the modern web.
The great thing I've found about running an oldschool web forum is this - if you don't run any advertising, Google doesn't care about you and you won't show up in search results.
So only people who are told about it actually come to the site. It's really quite peaceful.
I knew of various webcams etc, but some of the more interesting parts of the old internet are still surfacing and surprising me today. I wish I'd known about this then. I recall browsing so many things and not valuing them because I didn't know that so much would disappear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triops
For a couple of weeks, it was regularly visited by about 1000 people, many of whom tuned in daily to watch the Triops - and fairy and banana shrimp - grow and grow.
It was a delightful little contribution to the realtime web back in the day, watching daily as the small teams of Triops grew and grew, big enough to catch the banana's and fairies .. and each other .. until, in the end, there was just one big fat Triops and nothing else in the tank, and then, nothing but sludge in the water.
I let the tank evaporate, meaning to let it rejuvenate and repeat the show again a few months later, but I repurposed the Indy cam and never got back to it. But, for a while, the little Triops critters were pretty popular, and I even got a few interesting emails from folks, once all the food had been expended and there was just one, big, fat Triops left, the final alpha ..