Connecting to the Internet – Finding My 15-Year-Old Website I Built at 16 | Hacker News Reader

Connecting to the Internet – Finding My 15-Year-Old Website I Built at 16

randomdrake.com

71 pointsrandomdrake49 comments

I'm kind of amazed that the two links to Amazon and Barnes & Noble still work. Talk about backwards compatibility! Amazon has probably changed dozens if not hundred of things server side since 1999.

Old link - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517149257/o/qid=9295...

New link - http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-Douglas-Ada...

Basically just this part is relevant: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517149257/. Which seems to be the ISBN-10. I don't think this crazy to keep working, they probably have some other ways of looking up a book based on the ISBN.

Yeah, but the fact they managed to keep all the redirects working since that version is laudable. Sometimes this is scattered somewhere between the codebase and server configuration and gets lost between migrations.

Have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_...

That is how Amazon can maintain such good link backwards compatibility although for books this is even easier as it just has to parse the ISBN and job done. ASIN allows them to tag everything ever on Amazon and keep it linkable. Good future planning from back in the 90s though I guess.

Thanks for the link. Very good planning indeed.

Wow, I'd always wondered what the heck obidos was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obidos_%28software%29

Amazing.

I wondered that on just about every link. Same with old BBC News links with /hi/ (if anyone knows what that one is, go ahead).

My ISP was Prodigy back in the day, and possibly something else before that. Paying per hour was awful. I spent hours downloading a WAV file of some video game music from Nintendo.com and was so excited when it completed successfully. Little did I know it was a 1-2 second random sound clip - ugh so disappointing! :)

I spent a good month or so (unsuccessfully) changing my modem initialization parameters (?) in an attempt to be able to play Doom 2 (or Duke Nukem?) over the internet with my friends and their fancy Gateway computers. It was so frustrating. I had no idea what I was doing and no Internet to turn to. I upgraded my DOS modem to a Windows modem and it made no difference. I was sent a link to TEN.net on IRC a year or so later and finally got to play my first online game, woo.

Things were much more anonymous back then. I remember applying for a job with XOOM.com - I had been active in their support community for a while and they sent me an employment application. They had no idea I was underage until I sent in my application, haha.

lol! I too spent hours tweaking modem params to get the best speeds. Sometimes having to disconnect and reconnect because the ISP connected me at 33.6 instead of 56k (or more commonly 48.8).

Oh, the good old memories! Having a seperate phone line just for the internet was a godsend! Also the times you tried to get online and hit a busy signal? During peak times it could take upwards of 30 minutes to connect, yikes!

I have some fond memories of writing "punters" for the AOL kiddies to send instant message bombs to boot people offline. Creating some of my first web pages on Geocities.

Using download managers like FlashGet was helpful to download multiple things on dialup. Not to mention it included a resume feature.

I still have my first website that I ran on a web server in my dorm room on a 19K serial connection in 1996. It helped get me my first post-college job at a corporate bank despite having a psychedelic purple background, animated smilies, and a prominent picture of Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) burping on the homepage. I think the fact that I was running my own web server in 1996 in my dorm was of more interest than the content... except my resume, perhaps.

The biggest change in my mind from 1999 to today is the connectivity of startups.

I was doing my first startup in '99, and we were doing the typical "work out of the owners basement" lifestyle.

We did not have an internet connection.

We had local servers on which we built and tested everything, and then we would email the code to our customers with deployment instructions for their servers. This quickly got old, so we gained access to a dial-up VPN so we could at least deploy the code online.

After about 6 months, we had saved up enough money to get an office. The building had no connectivity. We called and got an ISP to connect a T1 to the building, which we then shared with the rest of the tenants.

Far, far different than today when an internet connection is pretty much a given at any job.

My ancient 1996 era website is still up on my old .edu account. It's embarrassingly pretentious, but I can't change it now. (though, in a way, I wonder if my password has been changed. they didn't have ssh back then tho...) In a way, it's nice to remind me how far I've come.

Is there a website that collates into a single timeline the information about what the typical home computer hardware configuration, screen resolution, OS, browser, Internet connection type and speed, etc. were for a user of the Internet (or rather, the WWW) in a given year?

I've been looking for something like this for a while and the linked post reminded me of the fact (as well as why such a website would be fun to have).

I haven't seen such a thing. The easiest way to come up with something like that would probably be to find a magazine archive of something like PC Magazine and come up with some sort of methodology to pick a typical, say, Dell system for each given year.

"To get all the professional features, you had to pay money for your browser; a ludicrous idea today."

UK: Yup, I walked into a software shop in Birmingham's city centre just before then and bought a copy of Netscape for around £20 or so. It came on floppies in a box with a short manual, and I installed it on my Pentium with 16Mb of RAM. It has moved fast in 15 years.

I mean, floppies cost money. Even if you had a second phone line to tie up downloading a collection of floppies, where would you store it?

(Or did you have an HDD by that time? I forget)

Oh, yes we had hard drives. 5.25 inch Quantum Bigfoot to be precise. Netscape was paid for software originally. EULA and all.

Mid-1990s, Pentium with 16MB RAM? A computer back then was pretty much identical to a computer today -- Windows 95 looks and feels little different from Windows XP. The hard drive would've been a ~1-1.6GB 5.25" IDE drive, FAT32 formatted, which will plug right into any motherboard that still has the connector (or an IDE->USB external enclosure, which you can pick up at Staples today for $20). The software on that drive would mostly still run in Win8 too.

There may have been a RAM upgrade at some point, I remember buying a pair of 32Mb sticks...

Editing large image files took a long time as you went into swap. Being able to capture, edit and play video (at any resolution!) would have been very impressive on that old Celeron.

Haha. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I love how many sites (mine included) used the "Under Construction" mention back then.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, randomdrake. I'm the same age as you, and just found my own 15-year-old page (in my case, a Discworld info compendium with game mods I'd built, and walkthroughs I'd written). Hurrah for Geocities mirrors, and embarrassing teenage selves.

Funnily enough, a HN thread the other day made me revisit my first ever web app as well. 'Tis the season?

It feels like today it's pretty easy to get started building things, certainly a lot easier than the PHP mess I ended up in 10+ years ago. On the other hand I think it can get overwhelming, and the complexity of today's web apps and sites make it hard for a beginner to grok how to replicate them. Plus, the design bar is a lot higher, even though there are plenty of off-the-shelf kits to help. The era of self-expression through hand-tweaked HTML is gone, for the most part; cover photos have replaced MySpace layouts, and who needs a personal domain when you have your @-handle?

I haven't really had a look for my old fora so decided to have a go using the Wayback Machine [1].

Kinda awesome that they're indexed, cause I lost my own copies:

OneSports: https://web.archive.org/web/20050409093857/http://forums.one...

Philosophers' Cave (only partially :(): https://web.archive.org/web/20041024050540/http://www.philos...

I'm Wolverine in both cases :)

[1] https://web.archive.org/index.jsp

And yet, some things are eerily familiar. In 1999 online life was dominated for non-geeks by AOL. In 2014 replace AOL with Facebook and the dynamic is pretty much the same. The difference is that AOL had to spend a fortune to produce or acquire content. Facebook gets us to do that for free.

My first website was on VirtualAve which was the best free service at the time for those who wanted to host their own raw HTML.

I still occasionally hope someone kept the entire archive of that service and someday makes it available. :(

Wayback Machine has my first Web page - the then ISP gave out free Web space starting in 1997 or so. 5Mb of space or so...

http://web.archive.org/web/19970131080252/http://www.xylem.d...

My current page isn't so different mind you (HTML -> Greymatter -> Moveable Type -> Wordpress -> back to static but Markdown markup).

I followed that exact progression, except that I'm using Pelican to create the static site today.

Ah, thanks for encouraging me to 'go back' :)

http://web.archive.org/web/19961227103606/http://realms.org/

That's the oldest capture on the wayback machine, though I was running that site starting in 1995.

I feel a bit old. :)

http://www.qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html

  -rw-r--r--    1 ftp      ftp          1341 Apr 07  1998 420.html

I recently found a forum I had started in 2004 was still "alive" (but empty). I'm incredibly surprised that the host didn't dry up and die. I was even able to get back into the admin account. For the curious(and with much forgiveness for my past self) http://hackr9483.proboards.com/

> Most Users Online: 27 (Jun 24, 2013 at 9:48pm)

What happened on Jun 24, 2013? Is that the day you found it again?

That's funny, some weeks ago I found my first real website from y2k in archive.org, but what I really would love to see is my GeoCities page from 1999 :>

I'm really thinking about making an 90's like Octopress theme for my blog, with a few friendly gif animations and without any kind of grid system... I'm so bored with the current aesthetic trend

Not much to say... just got reminded of some of my still extant pages from the last century: www.cem.msu.edu/~cem883/mathematica-instr.html

(SGI Multi processor boxes. Impressive purple boxes doing some amazing graphics on beautiful high resolution displays in the mid 1990's. Oh the memories).

Oh, the good old days of 1999. I was 17 back then, and already selling hosting accounts:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990125091016/http://murzik.com/

I had a couple of GeoShitties/Geocities websites around 1998 or so; I never bothered to check if they were in any of the downloading projects, but that article was some interesting nostalgia as I was certainly one of the younger people on the internet at the time.

Couple years back, I found my website from 94. Its mostly from an era that I didn't really know anyone on the web, but someone had a shell account somewhere.

Its also nicely pro free software, something that hasn't changed much.

I recently found the site I built at the age of 12. It was a animated gif-based "comic" detailing the life of a superhero named Mr. Gullible. i-frames and image maps, with my crude 12 year old humor haha. It's a great relic.

lol the domain for the MUD I ran from 1999 to like 2005 still exists, and the person that took it over is still running the site design I made back in 2004.

I'd ask for it back but I have no idea what I'd do with it.

     there was no Google to aggregate and sort through the depths of the World Wide Web

Hmmm, that's funny, I was using WebCrawler, AltaVista, and Google, in 1999.

Ah, those time when you had to optimize pics for loading time :)

wait, I still optimize my pngs! :)

Here's his site: http://guidetomedievia.tripod.com/main.htm

Small world: It's been awhile since I've last saw that name :) That MUD borrowed almost a decade of my life, and, enjoyed every minute of it.

Dagger of Fire > Ki-rin Horn imo.

Ki-rin was AE if I recall correctly. Only folks who could get away with amazing AE builds were in 52. Oh Tharghan and his Rogues of the Forbidden Legion.

LOSK for life.

I still remember the commercials for 56k with some little kid boasting to his friend that he could "stream" videos.

that IE window brings so many good memories... I remember hiding phone bills from my parents because dial-up @ local rates weren't cheap at the time!

That sure is a boring perspective of the web of the last 15 years.

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