

Connecting to the Internet – Finding My 15-Year-Old Website I Built at 16 - randomdrake
http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/22/connecting-to-the-internet-finding-my-15-year-old-website-i-built-at-16/

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ToastyMallows
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...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517149257/o/qid=929505204/sr=2-1/002-9367729-7762218)

New link - [http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-Douglas-
Ada...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-Douglas-
Adams/dp/0517149257)

~~~
InTheSwiss
Have a read of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_Number)

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.

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

~~~
blueskin_
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).

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nogridbag
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.

~~~
c0deporn
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).

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rdudek
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.

------
JohnTHaller
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.

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codingdave
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.

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wiredfool
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.

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networked
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).

~~~
ghaff
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.

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keithpeter
_" 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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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)

~~~
dangrossman
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.

~~~
keithpeter
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.

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

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jlees
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?

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kartikkumar
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050409093857/http://forums.onesports.net/)

Philosophers' Cave (only partially :():
[https://web.archive.org/web/20041024050540/http://www.philos...](https://web.archive.org/web/20041024050540/http://www.philosopherscave.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=323)

I'm Wolverine in both cases :)

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

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codva
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.

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ChikkaChiChi
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. :(

~~~
keithpeter
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970131080252/http://www.xylem.demon.co.uk/)

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

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

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961227103606/http://realms.org/](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. :)

------
jlgaddis
[http://www.qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html](http://www.qsl.net/n9wwv/420.html)

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

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earlz
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/](http://hackr9483.proboards.com/)

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

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

------
pera
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

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chetanahuja
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).

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iguana
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/](http://web.archive.org/web/19990125091016/http://murzik.com/)

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blueskin_
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.

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mattl
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.

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squigs25
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.

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OoTLink
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.

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D9u

         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.

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

~~~
pera
wait, I still optimize my pngs! :)

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lauradhamilton
Here's his site:
[http://guidetomedievia.tripod.com/main.htm](http://guidetomedievia.tripod.com/main.htm)

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davidandgoliath
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.

~~~
cozuya
Dagger of Fire > Ki-rin Horn imo.

~~~
randomdrake
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.

~~~
cozuya
LOSK for life.

------
c0deporn
I still remember the commercials for 56k with some little kid boasting to his
friend that he could "stream" videos.

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antr
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!

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

