
Welcome to the Old Internet Again - myth_drannon
http://theoldnet.com/
======
sgentle
If you want to get off at every stop on the nostalgia train, Slashdot keeps a
story archive going back to 1998:

[https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=bytime&keyword=&year=1998](https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=bytime&keyword=&year=1998)

Stand-out titles include:

"Nintendo-64 or PlayStation? Which to buy for XMas?"

"NGLayout now called Gecko to be released this week"

"Microsoft blows it again with Windows 2000 name"

"George Lucas Talks about new Star Wars movie"

"Debian 2.0 Beta IRC Party Tonight"

"PDA Overview: Pilot Still King"

~~~
runn1ng
“Linux Desktop is DOA?” (December 30, 1998)

Well not that much changed. (The submission comment talks how 1999 will be the
year of the Linux desktop.)

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
It was. RedHat with Ximian Desktop and Crossover Office was peak desktop
Linux.

~~~
jacquesm
It was peak desktop, not peak desktop Linux, and the bulk of the smartphones
that took the place of those desktops do in fact run Linux.

------
djsumdog
It's not in the list, but you can put windows95.com into the address bar. Man
that's some crazy nostalgia. I wonder if it pulls from archive.com or some
other old index/cache.

I remember that era of mIRC and eggdrop bots and fservs and Hotline clients
and NNTP servers and RealMedia encodes of Transformers Beast Machines from
Canada (which came out months before they did in the US and we'd leave our
dialup on all night to download them and then play them through a CRT so they
didn't look like trash).

A time when if you didn't find something on Lycos, you'd go to Yahoo and
Hotbot and Dogpile and different search engines gave you different results.

It was a different era.

~~~
Sendotsh
I’m sure it’s just the age I’ve hit, but I have been overwhelmingly nostalgic
for those days lately. The internet was FUN, while still being ridiculously
useful and efficient. The information of the entire planet was at our
fingertips and available instantly (well, at ~2Kb/s).

The web was minimal and slick and information-dense. Content owned the day,
whether it was super-active IRC channels or news groups or websites with a
728x90 banner at the top and the rest was content (most of which fit “above
the fold”!).

Now.. holy shit the web is a mess.

~~~
_iyig
Despite all its problems, this is one thing I like about 4chan. Minimal banner
ads, large images are auto-collapsed (so they don't overwhelm the text), and
menus/settings that do exist are almost entirely auto-hidden. Also no mid-post
image embedding, emotes, or 90s-era forum signatures. Every post is just text,
with an optional image attachment.

EDIT: Are these downvotes about the content on 4chan, which indeed is
generally terrible, or my thoughts on its UI design?

~~~
p_l
4chan derives its design from Japanese forums, and the Japanese web for had a
very minimalistic design to a huge part of it, even up to today, due to C-HTML
and use from flip phones.

------
davesmith1983
Jokes aside I recently setup a phpBB forum and me and friends are using IRC
instead of discord.

IRC is ridiculously fast and so is phpBB.

~~~
errantspark
What's made you migrate away from discord? I grew up on phpBB and IRC, but
I've been using discord almost exclusively for all my social media needs. The
seamless integration across desktop/mobile, the quick switcher, easy
filesharing and the powerful search functionality seem like killer
differentiators vs the oldschool way.

~~~
wildleaf
IMO voice chat in discord is unreliable. The rest is great barring privacy
concerns. I'd like to go back to mumble but my group's inertia is too strong.

~~~
cortesoft
But IRC has no voice chat, so that wouldn't be a reason to switch to IRC

~~~
mikekchar
They probably meant that while voice chat would normally be a reason to stop
you from migrating from Discord, in this case it wasn't because the OP doesn't
like Discord's voice chat. The rest is privacy concerns. I'm actually with the
OP. IRC with Mumble is a pretty nice setup for casual conversations and it's
really easy to self host (and takes very little resources). Filesharing is
potentially a problem, but there are other services for that.

------
daggasoft
Hey everyone this site is my project. It’s a constant struggle getting taken
off the spam blacklists because showing old versions of some sites counts as
phishing I guess. Someone mentioned XSS in the guestbook. I’m not sure what
they mean by that. The site should be handling this. Please report things like
this on the issue tracker which is linked on the site. Thanks and I’m glad
everyone is enjoying it!

------
css
Cisco Umbrella has this listed as security threat, FYI

~~~
keanebean86
The guestbook is vulnerable to XSS so it probably has a lot of other issues.

------
reidrac
This is not how I remember it. Default background colour in Netscape Navigator
was not white but #c0c0c0 (and IIRC it wast that colour in Mosaic too). And
yes, lots of pages relied on the default.

For example, this post has some screenshots:
[https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/whats-changed-in-the-
past-17-...](https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/whats-changed-in-the-
past-17-years/)

------
woodgrainz
Couple of other sites that allow you to get your nostalgic internet fix:

[https://www.versionmuseum.com/](https://www.versionmuseum.com/)

[https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/](https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/)

------
petercooper
So how is this working? I'm seeing traces of Wayback Archive here and there,
but it seems so much faster than when I ever use it directly..

 _Edit: Ah, if you go to the very bottom of the page, it explains the
situation: "It is a dumb, pass-through proxy. If the content exists in the
Internet Archive, and the content is requested by the end user, theoldnet will
blindly pass the search result from the Internet Archive to the end user."_

------
giaour
"The website you are trying to access has been identified as a security risk;
access has been disallowed by [corporate information security team]"

------
bscphil
Would be nice if the link was changed to
[http://theoldnet.com/](http://theoldnet.com/) which shows the home page and
works without Javascript. Otherwise you get the impression that this site is
just a proxy for archive.org. The home page is much more informative.

~~~
dang
Ok, changed from
[http://theoldnet.com/browser/](http://theoldnet.com/browser/). Not sure I
understand the difference.

------
svdr
Remember to set your browser window size to 640x480!

------
SmellyGeekBoy
I have my 486 online running IE under Windows 3.1, now I actually have some
sites I can demo on it when people ask me about it! Definitely bookmarking
this one.

------
bjnord
Usenet as it was 30 years ago: [http://olduse.net/](http://olduse.net/)

------
kodz4
Every time phones, OSes and websites update, I watch my parents struggling to
deal with all the UI changes and I keep thinking I am going to be there one
day.

Maybe this is the solution to all the unending changes. In Vernor Vinge's
Rainbows End, there is an old man who wakes up in the future and is struggling
to use the latest interfaces. So the comp just overlays the old Windows 95(?)
interface that he is happy and familiar with.

~~~
WalterBright
The UI changes are rarely better, and often much worse. They just shuffle
things around, and add annoying glitz.

Cars are getting pretty bad, too. Especially with the transition to
inscrutable icons. Apparently words like "On", "Defrost", "Fuel", etc., are
unhip and so 20th century.

~~~
mehrdadn
Defrost, on, fuel, etc. have had pretty standard icons for quite a while
though? And they don't require knowing English either.

~~~
pixl97
You mean the yellow boiling cauldron icon that no one knows what it is?

~~~
tire-pressure
The tire pressure icon is the newest and least comprehensible icon of them
all. I looked at it for years without knowing what it was, and never had any
flat tires, due to wear or pressure related damage. Just nails, debris and
scheduled rotation during inspections.

When I discovered that there was a new standard of RFID pressure sensor chips
embedded in the new tires I bought, suddenly it all clicked.

But that's what it took. I needed to shop around and buy a new set of tires,
notice that there were some, a little bit more expensive than others, read the
feature list, and notice the RFID chips listed in the spec.

RFID chips? In _my_ tires? It's more likely than you think!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-
pressure_monitoring_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-
pressure_monitoring_system)

Suddenly it all snapped into place. The worthless idiot light tells me
nothing, by magically interfacing with systems behind my back, and what's
more, every tire on the road is uniquely identifiable, through remote passive
electronic sensors.

This just quietly appears, on the down low. Low key spyware on essential
disposable components that everyone needs, and that everyone will eventually
be forced onto.

To get rid of them, usually they're in the valve stem, so you could probably
just microwave them with a disassembled magnetron, or run a high voltage arc
through them with a stun gun. But no one does.

------
Aromasin
Clicked the geocities.com link and got a "High Risk Website Blocked - Access
has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website"
notification from Sophos.

False flag, or malicious?

~~~
Blaiz0r
I think it's to do with the way the Wayback machine API is used and the site
altering the code of the webpage (removing incompatible JS and stitching
together links).

If you're on a coorporate network or have some kind of security firewall setup
this could be flagged as a tampered URL.

------
boyadjian
ESET NOD 32 does not like this site. Sorry.

------
godshatter
What I'd like to see is a filter that parsed the hmtl, threw out most of it,
and showed just the actual content in a minimalist fashion as an old website
would. If I could run specific links through this filter from the right-click
menu, for example, that would be awesome. Preferably with no need for
javascript once I got there. Does anyone know of something like this? Just
throw out all the modern UI crap and the ad crap and just give me the content.

Putting some urls in the text box made me remember this.

~~~
brookhaven_dude
Reader view in safari and firefox

~~~
godshatter
Interesting. I usually use Pale Moon. I don't know if it has a reader mode or
not. I got on firefox, clicked around for a while, and didn't find any pages
that let me trigger it. I did find an extension that lets you try it on any
web page, but it doesn't work on all of them. Anyway, better than nothing.
Thank you.

------
JoblessWonder
Wow. That "BIG SIMPSONS-PAGE" brings back memories. It looks almost exactly
like the first website I built on AOL's free web hosting (hometown). The
nostalgia is hitting me hard.

------
ecolonsmak
cisco umbrella does not like this site.

~~~
Analemma_
Neither does my workplace filtering; it's saying it's malware.

~~~
whymauri
same here

------
adrianmonk
Anyone remember Luke Young's Talking Burrito? It was a goofy little "choose
your own adventure" style story that a college student threw together about a
talking burrito and aliens and stuff. (And I think that's the right name.)

The choices were made by clicking hyperlinks. Hypertext is so normal now that
it's hard to relate, but at the time it was fun to see the transformation from
book format to hypertext. It was just such a natural fit.

------
Scoundreller
I guess AngelFire had a core user group of Medical Transcriptionists.

Here's their predictions for the future from 1996:
[http://theoldnet.com/get?decode=true&noscripts=true&year=199...](http://theoldnet.com/get?decode=true&noscripts=true&year=1996&url=http://angelfire.com/mt2/next.html)

Lots of talk about speech-to-text. Dragon doesn't seem to be 100% there yet
today in my observations.

------
52-6F-62
Changing sites didn't work for me in Firefox 67.0.3

~~~
djsumdog
Weird. Changing sites worked for me and I'm on that exact version
(Linux/Gentoo). Occasionally I'd get an error, but it'd go away if I go back
and try it again.

------
pnathan
if you just use html 4, minimal css, and no js, you'll get a good old internet
experience. :)

------
capSAR
This is one rabbit hole I don't mind falling in. So many links and pages to
poke around in!

------
libraryatnight
The old battle.net takes me back. Love the links to topaz chat and winter's
bot. I think I spent as much time on channel wars with "enemy" clans on bnet
as I did playing actual games.

------
gtirloni
I remember the time when storage providers were fighting for the title of who
had the most capacity. I think xoom.com started offering 1GB at some point and
that was unthinkable. Good times.

------
InTheArena
Missing Midwinter's Lurker's guide to Babylon 5...

~~~
fsiefken
O yes, that was one of my goto's as well

------
PDFormat
None of the functionality seems to be working for me in Chrome 75, Windows 10

------
aussiegeek
How can the under construction image at the bottom of the page not be a gif?

------
miguelmota
The good old days when JavaScript wasn't used for janky animations

------
work_is_play
Yeah, back when websites loaded immediately and all at once.

~~~
krapp
Actually, websites tend to load much faster now than they used to, because
"back when," we were using 28k dialup connections, and you would sometimes
have to watch a site load a piece at a time. And heaven help you if there were
images in the stream, those would probably break.

------
jmkd
Lovely use of Netscape Navigator UI

------
siekmanj
> theoldnet.com is currently unable to handle this request.

Not sure if intentional or hilarious irony.

------
VyseofArcadia
> We're sorry but theoldnet-browser doesn't work properly without JavaScript
> enabled. Please enable it to continue.

This doesn't look much like the old internet to me...

~~~
jancsika
I never understood realism in painting for this very reason. The frame around
the painting makes it impossible to accept the painting as the thing it's
pretending to be.

~~~
Veen
You could make the same point for cameras and the human visual system. Neither
accurately depict what's really there.

Plus, realist art isn't pretending to be what's really there, with the
possible exception of trompe l'oeil. It's a representation in paint, a mimicry
created for various purposes, none of which is to make you think you're
standing in front of the thing being depicted.

------
juststeve
malware

~~~
kiliancs
This comment might be referring to Trend Micro reporting links on this site as
malware:

> Warning! The website contains malware. Visiting this site may harm your
> computer

> Fraudulent sites that mimic legitimate sites to gather sensitive
> information, such as usernames and passwords.

~~~
juststeve
ESET Nod32 said it was malware, but second try said it was fine :/

