Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work

mentalfloss.com

80 pointsjamesbritt37 comments

There's absolutely nothing wrong with websites that use basic HTML and styling from 199x. If anybody remembers, the power of the web is that it democratizes publishing so anybody can have a global presence. Putting hosting, styling and development requirements on that are simply barriers that fewer and fewer people can cross.

Keeping things simple, even if they aren't the latest js framework running on the latest hosting backend is actually totally fine.

Get ready for these to be deleted too! :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6672029 -> http://nypost.com/2013/11/05/microsoft-com-is-stuck-in-the-1... -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6681746

I hope not. Seems silly.

One of my faves: Acme Klein Bottles: http://kleinbottle.com/ , a novelty glassware shop ran by astronomer, author and glass blower Cliff Stoll. They sell hats and Moebius scarves just as well :-)

Despite the looks, the website is very much active and grows over time.

Back when I was at school we sourced a bottle from there for a teacher.

Yep, same guy (my first time posting to Ycombinator - smiles to all!).

To my amazement, people still want Klein bottles (in 1995, my wife told me that nobody would buy these things) For the past five or ten years, I update m'website mainly to add content.

Someday I'll drag its code into the 21st century - remove the old cruft and maybe even use css. But flash just tires my eyes.

As my friends (online and off) can attest, I make Klein bottles mainly for fun. It's a zero-volume home business, small enough to be run from one room; the warehouse occupies the crawlspace under our house.

Of course, the best part of Acme Klein Bottles is meeting people: via email, occasional visits, talks at schools & math colloquia, and chattering about physics & LTE & coding with friends at my day-job (Hi Newfield People!). Which is to say, it'll be a while before I recast my kleinbottle website - I'm having too much fun doing other things.

One of my favorites was the set of galleries Microsoft put together in 2007 to show off CSS in its infancy: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/entrance.htm .. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/4.htm etc.

1997, even.

Some (most?) of the samples in there work in IE11 but not in FF25. Some of them don't even work correctly in IE11. That's a taste of the good old days, right there.

Oopsie, yeah. In fact, I just noticed one of them is even 1996! :)

The prototypal CSS zen garden: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/extract1.htm

Zombo.com's parody is strangely timeless.

If you don't want to run Flash:

http://html5zombo.com/

My 1995 "homepage" is still online. I haven't had access to it since '96, and the company that hosted it seized to exist round the turn of the century.

I have no idea where exactly it is, and why on earth it is still online, but I'm fully expecting to celebrate it's 20 year anniversary soon.

ceased

URL?

Another one that's quite bone chilling is http://www.heavensgate.com/

I suspect that the ISP deliberately keeps it up for historical reasons.

The "Welcome to Netscape" page (http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html) also still has working links to "What's New" on the Internet from June 1993 through October 1994:

http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html

... and a page on the team:

http://mosaic.mcom.com/highres/bios.html

If you want to see some horrible UI designs in 2000 this site has not been updated since then.

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=shame.htm&mode=or...

EDIT: MY mistake. Apparently this is a mirror of the original.

It would be really funny if at the end, Craigslist was there.

(in terms of looks)

I actually thought I was seeing Craigslist when Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches came up.

http://www.timecube.com/ is present on the internet archive since 1998, but I think it's been out there from before.

One of the first sites I created with a friend in junior high for the ThinkQuest competition: http://library.thinkquest.org/12632/intromap1.html

Be prepared to be amazed by the animated gifs, HTML maps and statements like "this site is best viewed in Netscape 3.0"

http://www.google.com has not changed much since 1999.

Here is old version: https://web.archive.org/web/19991129021746/http://www13.goog...

The size has increased by over an order of magnitude. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4647834

Oh my, the .htm extension visible in the address bar... The nostalgia kicks in!

Well this one had a nice story on it:

http://toastytech.com/evil/ieisevilstory.html

> Web Browsers really make poor client application runtimes for all but the most basic of things.

Little did he know that we'd have Microsoft to thank for the innovation (XMLHttpRequest) that would eventually bring the era of desktop software to a close.

I also found this part amusing:

> Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention.

Maybe we haven't gotten there completely yet, but holy cow. WebGL, more web-based applications than you can shake a stick at, and OS emulation in-browser. I think it's close. :)

One person's future is another person's mindless drivel, I guess.

Edit: Oh gosh, it's still being updated.

http://toastytech.com/evil/rants.html

Thankfully mobile OS will save us from such future.

I admit. I don't know how I feel about that.

I know most people are psyched about the end of desktop software, but personally I can't stand apps that don't belong in the browser, being ported to run in the browser.

Yeah, it's as if apps were written in VBA, and you opened OUTLOOK.DOC in Word to read your email. Well that's exactly what Gmail is.... Crazy.

Translation: we can thank Microsoft for creating a world where you need to run whatever arbitrary software some website sent you just so that you can click on some underlined text and go to a different website.

(Also the fact that at least half the websites I see these days manage to break basic browser features like "Back," "Forward," "Bookmarks," etc.)

Yep, this is a good summary of it. I'm seriously contemplating lurking on Gopher again, just to get rid of all this crap.

I've actually been to the dole/kemp website because I thought it was hilarious that he closed his presidential debate with a mention of it. Yeah, Bob, the "Young people of America" are going to go to your webpage in droves. Kodos had a better chance.

(Penultimate sentence) http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-6-1996-debate-...

I think I've got one like that, still hiding on my web-server somewhere.

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