
Cameron's World - zeitg3ist
http://www.cameronsworld.net/
======
eljimmy
I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It
truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.

~~~
bliti
Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities
and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly
with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings
without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here
and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a
docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used
to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about
crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors
of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with
questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly
Go is without getting hate email for weeks...

~~~
hellofunk
A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the
Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking,
improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that
as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can
think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental
bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on
HN in recent weeks).

~~~
bliti
I'll make sure to revisit Clojure again, thank you. Any specific
recommendation as to where to start looking?

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vidarh
Made me think of this: [http://www.arngren.net/](http://www.arngren.net/)

It's a Norwegian technology/gadget retailer that was basically the Norwegian
equivalent of what Radioshack used to be. Then it was sold to some
entrepreneur back in 2000, promptly went bankrupt, and was bought back by the
original founder. The design stems from the design of their huge paper
catalogue back in the 80's.

~~~
ddmf
Which reminded me of [http://www.lingscars.com/](http://www.lingscars.com/)

~~~
teh_klev
I had no idea she was still in business. Good for her, I thought she was
brilliant on Dragon's Den.

~~~
ddmf
Yes, she was. The website still hurts my eyes, but it works and manages to
impart some of her personality, making me want to browse it more.

------
knappador
Not two years ago I was having a conversation with an old friend that went
approximately:

"Facebook, this whole internet thing, hasn't really..."

"...worked out"

"Yeah, this isn't what we thought it was gonna be. Let's just... "

"...turn it off"

There was a belief implicit in the idea of every human on Earth being
connected. Many of the phenomenon that came about have made that belief look
vulnerable to a certain cynicism, a cynicism about humanity, that we fear in
each other, that we hold towards ourselves. A currency that bound us together
face to face became fiat and then failed at scale. It is within the vacuum
painted by this fear that the organizing effects of the old-world economy have
been fallen back on, but I do not presently fear this cynicism, and I save my
currency wherever I can earn it.

------
fitzwatermellow
Link to interview with Berlin-based designer Cameron Askin:

[http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-
images...](http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images-
organized-neatly/)

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MrBra
This for sure conveys a certain magic, I cannot quite explain how that happens
honestly, but we have to recognize that the highly amateurish design makes for
a more.. alive thing.

Hmmm, are we close to the next paradigm shift? :)

Perhaps there is a reason why after the perfectly smooth and metal-shining
flying-saucers the next stage is usually biotechnologies..

~~~
digi_owl
Now you got me thinking about a notion i have when i see photos of houses for
sale. All of them show rooms to styled and pristine that my first thought is
that nobody lives there.

Any place where a human lives (unless they are suffering from some kind of OCD
or whatever) inevitably end up having things stacked in corners or strewn
across surfaces in a semi-random fashion. You can almost trace a timeline from
what is on top of what.

I wonder if designers end up stuck trying to reproduce Platonic ideals, thus
making everything look sterile.

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bjz_
I love internet archaeology. Contemporary Home Computing[0] has some great
pages. I particularly like the one analysing the so-called 'Prof. Dr.
Style'[1].

[0]: [http://contemporary-home-computing.org/](http://contemporary-home-
computing.org/) [1]: [http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-
style/](http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/)

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htor
I was expecting this to be David Cameron's new website. Was not disappointed!

~~~
cpncrunch
I was expecting to see a story about some new colony that has no porn and lots
of surveillance.

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camworld
This is not, I repeat, this is not my old CamWorld (pioneering blog) site from
the late 1990s. :-)

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rayiner
Still faster than Engadget's homepage.

~~~
smrtinsert
And easier to use than Facebook.

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amilr
So great. Yahoo should not have been allowed to shutdown Geocities.

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feld
This is great :-) My friend made a similar site, but not quite as extravagant:

[http://rainbowdivider.com](http://rainbowdivider.com)

Every refresh is a new experience!

~~~
rcr
Some friends of mine decided we're going to bring webrings back. This was my
attempt: [http://rcr.io/webring.htm](http://rcr.io/webring.htm)

~~~
feld
I came up with an idea for a new webring which is some remote javascript you
embed in your page and it's hosted on github and people do pull requests to
add their website to a text file to join the webring

Want to start a new webring? Fork the project, alter slightly

~~~
feld
I should note that it's an entirely satirical idea :)

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smonff
It is beautiful. At least there wasn't any Flash and no corporate-jumbotroned-
conventionnal-websites.

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schoen
If you like animated GIFs as art, you might enjoy Olia Lialina's work.

[http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html](http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html)
(warning: page autoplays audio)

------
ekanes
My oldest site is 20 years old, haven't updated it in forever, but kinda fun
it's still there! [http://www.coolsig.com/](http://www.coolsig.com/)

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Uptrenda
So many broken links. It's a shame that more couldn't be saved.

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harrylove
If this was the internet of old I'd still be waiting for the first row of GIFs
to load and my computer would grind to a halt after the fifth.

But I do miss it so.

~~~
sideproject
Totally agree. This would have killed my computer back in the mid or late
90's!

I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome on my Mac
(I do have a new Mac...).

We've come a long way. :)

~~~
mattdotc
>I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome

Well, to be fair, this is a modern website composed of artifacts from the
Geocities archive. This page would be a beast if it were implemented with
techniques of the era.

Looking at the source for the page, the author seems to be lazy loading the
assets and then dynamically placing them in the page with CSS.

We've definitely come a long way.

------
a3n
Under construction gifs!

It's like finding an old TV show and watching it with my teenager. "Yeah, we
used to think this was really cool."

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barteklev
Impressive. I hardly remember an old internet, but well, created a website at
times when people used to use <marque> tag. :-) This site made me think about
it. Probably we've lost something with this whole progress and knowledge how
to design, maybe started overdoing it often? I don't know. Thanks.

------
axx
The truly amazing thing is, that I can visit that site from my phone without
any lag or performance issues.

Welcome to the future!

------
aplkorex
If I could only view this through my skinned IE 5... I never thought I'd be
nostalgic for this, but I am.

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comrh
Not enough tables in the HTML though.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
But they did have plenty of frames though!

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ourmandave
It should have a message that tells you to _downgrade_ your browser for the
best experience.

~~~
leni536
You _upgrade_ it to Catscape Navigator.

> Catscape is the most advanced browser available.

> Version 2.324.46948633454654564646

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usaphp
My macbook got CPU throttling at 100% when I stayed at that page for around a
minute :)

~~~
collyw
Should have bought a PC.

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shaaaaawn
I was recently trying to dig up the IDE's of the early internet publishing
platforms like Geocities, Tripod, MySpace (1.0) to try and do a similar
project. Could only find the archived pages/assets like this.

~~~
ZenoArrow
IDE... I might be remembering this wrong, but weren't GeoCities sites coded
offline and uploaded as static files?

Also... [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

------
leni536
Reminded me:

[http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/](http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/)

Warning: I think it plays sound, I have no speakers right now.

------
smrtinsert
This is very well done.

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Kiro
So a lot of "new" stuff in the source (HTML5 doctype, "no-js" body class,
apple-touch-icon, FB things etc). Is this site being updated still?

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davesque
Wow...nostalgia. They should add a fake connection throttle to the site so all
the GIFs take 1 minute to load and it would seem even more authentic.

------
leni536
My favorite part is the little green sign:

> Welcome to the INTERNET

> ENJOY the RIDE

~~~
foobarian
That just reminded me of Mahir[1] and his "Welcome to my home page... I kiss
you!" fad. Good times...

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20040905074540/http://www.ikissyo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040905074540/http://www.ikissyou.org/indeks2.html)

------
chejazi
So much cheese. My favorite:

 _IF YOU STUDY THE MATERIAL ON THIS WEBSITE YOU WILL HOPEFULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT
OUR PURPOSE HERE ON EARTH HAS BEEN._

------
MrBra
Funny how on first page right now there's also Bootstrap 4-alpha :)

~~~
mendelk
Relevant: [http://code.divshot.com/geo-
bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/)

~~~
MrBra
Haha!

------
jscholes
Can you disable the automatic playback of the music, please? Screen reader
users cannot hear a thing over it all. I know you're trying to create a
tribute to the web of old, but this particular throwback is not one I think
deserves a place.

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hitekker
I can see eternity.

Nice work!

------
dogma1138
So much win!

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hadeharian
Be afraid.

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rickdale
I just had to imp my car. Did a quick google search read the first two steps
and then bam I was hit with a screen taking over advertisement that took me
15-30secknds to get off of my screen. The first thing that I thought was,
"damn the Internet sucks." And I was let referring to my connection.

