My mentor at a small ISP in the early 2000s had friends and sites like this. I even remember Monkey.org specifically. I honestly feel like I grew up in the ruins of the old internet - too young to be a old beard and too old to be a digg/Reddit user and far too old to be a Twitter-er. Quake was too old and half-life was too new. I’ve always wanted to write about my lack of community - a sysadmin after sysadmins went extinct and the oldest of the devops - but I fear like the subject of the essay - no one would be around to read it.
I miss the old goons I grew up idolizing. Wonder where they are now - with their children and their CTO positions.
Don’t take community or friends for granted. Y’all Monkeys are luckier than you know.
I feel exactly the same way. My brother is ten years older than me, so I discovered the Internet at a very young age. It was like a science fiction western, filled to the brim with hackers and webmasters.
Once I grew up and became a developer, I never found a community like the ones I saw when I was a kid. To me, even open-source projects often look like corporate projects in comparison. There was a sense of excitement back then that no longer exists today - or at least, I can't seem to find it.
I am filled with nostalgia whenever I see retro art, like the first edition of Shadowrun books.
I feel the same way, growing up there was an era of excitement and pure passion -- it's like that's lost today. That's why I've been trying to build up a list of people who feel the same and making a tiny channel for it.
I feel the same way. Nowadays everything seems corporate and advertiser-friendly like a cyberpunk city.
I miss the forums I used to participate in during early 2000s. It was a profoundly human experience with good and bad moments. It's also the reason I speak english today. Found multiple communities dedicated to a video game series I liked. There were boards about everything, from the games themselves to fan creations and the almighty off-topic board. All kinds of people frequented these places. I remember I got to know many of them. Sometimes while I'm browsing reddit I recognize an old nickname from those days and I am tempted to send a PM.
I started just right I suppose. My first modem was 28k. Windows 95 was just out (I had used win 3.1 a bit before that). Slackware was my Linux distribution. I was in high school. Doom was just out. We made Doom maps and dialed each other up to play. My kids are 14 and 9. I am CTO at my own small consulting firm now.
I’m no industry titan, but I have been around the block. Many came before me, but I have seen the modern Internet rise from almost nothing. We all have to start somewhere. I still use Reddit, guess I am too old for it, but I started when it was all about programming, and had just launched. I was a developer first, but also a sysadmin for a startup. Did that from 2000-2006, before we called it DevOps. Someone had to keep the servers up. I was huge into MUDs and coding/building them... I actually kept track of a couple of the people I played with over all these years, but only a couple.
YC, Paul Graham, and the entrepreneurial spirit is built into me now. I read every Pg essay when it came out. In my career I only worked at a larger company for a few years in my 22 year career in tech this far. Tech is weird some days.
Now get off my lawn and all you kids stop using NoSQL and JavaScript and quit writing electron apps ;)
Gosh I started with a 2600 bps. I think I still have it. It was given to me since the ones out in market were 28kpbs (expensive). Eventually I got a 14.4 kbps. I felt like I was flying.
I did some free work for someone. The logo was for "Digi(something)" ... is it one of you monkey's?
I used QuarXPress and Photoshop. One of the first software I used and installed on a 3.5 disk. At a young age this was exciting tech time for me.
Heh, kind of glad I started when I did. 14.4 and up modems really were quite usable back then, for what the web was. I still remember waiting for big files like MUD source code. Also, I remember installed Slackware with a dozen or so floppy disks :)
Started with 300 and was insanely jealous of people when 1200 became affordable enough for them. I think I eventually got 1200, but then many people had moved to 2400.
Started w/sleepover's at my buddy's house dialing into the mainframe to play Adventure on his Dad's terminal w/acoustic coupler modem. Pretty sure it was slower than 300.
I had 300 baud, which had a switch on the side. I would call a BBS and flip it on when it made the handshake beeps. I tried to host a BBS of my own between the hours of 7pm and 9pm, but my parents were not happy with it.
Can we please come together and form a sort of tilde club on IPFS oder the Dat protocol?
Like "The Well" for today, with intelligent, respectful conversations in a format that is not as toxic as 140 characters and no sane threading?
So that the protocol itself will filter away the eternal septemberists?
And can we please make it uncomfortable for the "I need total anonymity for my free speech conspiracy BS", so that we also keep these nutcracks away from our community?
I actually signed up for The Well a while ago, just to see what it was all about. Unfortunately it felt very stagnant, IMHO. I guess its heyday is over.
A side note: The internet sure was a different place back then. Content was not made for ads like it is now! People posted stuff for everyone to share, and the best stuff rose to the top. I really miss the early internet before the ads came.
I can relate - most of the internet and communities I knew from the late 90s to early 2000s are gone. I'm not very fond of Reddit, but Twitter is quite welcoming to the middle-aged too!
I joined HN after feeling the /. community that I had loved became too... negative and political than I liked. I asked around about another community and that's when I first learned about HN.
I think I kind of understand what you mean, but your similes don't really make sense. Far too old to be a Twitterer? Donald Trump would beg to differ. Quake (1996) and Half-Life (1998) are also not far enough apart to be generation-defining. In the end, if you fail to be accepted by a community, you can always find reasons for it, but you can never be sure if you're correct about them...
BTW, I find this (mostly) American tendency to divvy up people into strict categories by their age very strange: boomers, gen. X/Y/Z, millennials etc., each with their own stereotypes. Which leads to even more alienation when people look at these (and other) stereotypes and think that they don't fit in because they don't recognize themselves in them. Of course they don't, because every person is unique!
I'm probably a similar age, I remember growing up reading NTK while feeling too young to be a part of all that, then by the time I grew older it was gone.
Yeah, I was about to say they came out around the same time. Even Doom and Quake is only three years apart, but I feel like it was much more. Maybe because I was younger at the time.
But it's possible they did not get online until much later.
My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993).
But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.
I didn't get online until 95-96 I think, I'm just 2 years older and for example I completely missed the BBS thing because living in a small town phone costs were prohibitive but by the time dial-up became a thing there were the first nightly flat-rates (like from 8PM to 8AM at an affordable price) so we went online almost daily. But online gaming wasn't possible anyway, I remember throwing some LAN-party with my closest friends to multi-play Quake but that's it. But I didn't feel I was too old for Quake at all
It was a very long time ago, but I had a long running account that was in the $5-10/month range that I used to host my email, a blog, and a self-hosted picture sharing app. IIRC, the plan either had unlimited space, or the space limit grew every month. I had 100's of gigabytes of photos that were accessible via the photo app, and I had some small % of files in a folder named backup that wasn't publicly accessible to the internet.
Apparently backups of any kind were not allowed by the TOS, but this was buried somewhere deep in the TOS, and once they made the decision to shut me down there was no recourse. I had something like a week to move everything away from dreamhost. I believe my account was targeted because I was using a large amount of disk space (for TOS legitimate purposes) and they wanted to find any reason to let me go.
Mine wasn't quite the same. I hosted some PHP scripts when I was learning to code.
After some spat with a forum troll on another site, he sent some kind of complaint to Dreamhost.
In retrospect, I suspect this was a DMCA notice, either way DreamHost never really explained to me why they shut down my account, but they did so _immediately_ without any notice, they wouldn't let me download any of my data.
They offered very cheap and generous disk space, but only for the purpose of serving web content... not personal backups. Obviously they were counting on most people not using it all.
They ended up specifying a percentage of your quota you could use for any sort of backup or personal storage to try settling the matter.
Newdream is a great memory! The exploding of new media/design zines of in the late 1990s was really something. Newdream of course, but Lockjaw, K10K, Kiiroi, Newstoday, Uploading...man, that was a cool time.
I loved that ethos. It just seemed like it was group after group of really talented teenagers with pirated copies of Photoshop putting together these elaborate projects and releases, sort of like the demo scene in Europe or the elite ANSI group artpacks from the BBS days.
I haven’t thought about it or them in forever, but Lockjaw was my favorite. Whenever they’d have a release, it may as well have been my favorite band releasing a new album. You could just see how quickly the modern aesthetics (and what people figured out they could do with JavaScript) were changing.
I worked part-time for a design studio back then (eventually bought by Razorfish, which should really date my story to a specific era!) and it was just so visibly obvious that the print designers weren’t going to be able to catch up. The new wave took over so fast, and it was all these cool punk kids who could design it and code it at the same time.
I hesitate to call it “better” because there was nothing even close to frameworks or version control or anything back then. But it was certainly more original.
Nice to meet you! I was a paying customer about 9 years ago. Enjoyed the service. It was the best hosting platform I could find at the time that served my needs. I remember calling in support one time, a guy answered, and I thought "gosh, sounds like someone working out of their bedroom". Congratulations!
These places on the "independent web" are sadly getting more and more obscure to find via search engines.
It's an unfortunate reflection of the "mainstream web" that I feel compelled to remark on the use of simple HTML and CSS, only marred by a single Google Analytics script. There's not a lot of content here, but there's also not a lot of bloat either.
not really relatated at all to my search, but I'm very glad to find it. A beutiful looking site indeed. This is the kind of stuff I remember doing back in the 90s, you'd search for something then something more random would show up but often be interesting to check out.
Loved this.. Landed on someone's site that promoted "Game design for websites"...
"OK, you've created your web site, registered it, then found that there are 341 other web sites in your search engine category. How do you distinguish your web site from all of the rest? How do you encourage visitors to remember and revisit your web site? Add a games area!"
Holy hell this is incredible. I've wanted exactly this to exist for years and now it does. Does Wiby still crawl the web? How can we give a project like this wings? It restores the true Internet.
It seems that you have to submit pages to wiby, and it’s URL and all subpages will then be indexed if they follow their rukes. You can talk about it to others and you can donate, that’s probably all this project needs.
Rules are written on their submit page [1]. They prefer non-commercial, content-focused websites with lightweight HTML. The submit page also suggests they don't do link crawling, but only allow submission of individual URLs.
I love the idea, but it seems quite hacker-oriented (for a lack of a better term). Most searches will return something UNIX or hardware related (e.g. "table tennis").
That's true, but on the other hand, I find myself steadily finding them anyway (many on HN). This site is obviously not for mass consumption by the general public, so it's OK that it isn't highly ranked by Google. Google is for the average user. Sites like this are discovered by their target audience and spread largely by wires of mouth.
> This site is obviously not for mass consumption by the general public, so it's OK that it isn't highly ranked by Google. Google is for the average user. Sites like this are discovered by their target audience and spread largely by wires of mouth.
You find some really good in-depth content for niche areas on these sort of sites (personal HTML websites, neocities.org, etc.). But if you forget the URL, it's usually very hard to find them again on Google even with using specific keywords. Too much SEO spam clogging up the results. I suspect not having Google Analytics scripts on the pages may also contribute.
One that I can remember off the top of my head was a blog with a pink-ish background with content on making quills and ink from plants, among other stuff. One post specifically had an easy ink recipe that used walnuts iirc. Google will show you tons of big SEO'd Wordpress blogs with ads/affiliate links but not the old school genuine site.
Another one was the blog of a day trader (a real one, not a guy trying to sell day trading courses). Impossible to find. site:wordpress.com helps filter out some of the SEO spam but I think it must have been hosted on a custom domain. It definitely looked like a standard Wordpress website when I read it a long time ago.
I think that reflects a change in the way the web is used.
Anecdotally, I clicked on the monkey.org link, poked around for thirty seconds, found
- an FAQ that didn't answer any questions I had
- a list of users (no particular reason to click on any, so I didn't)
- a list of domains (no particular reason to click on any, so I didn't)
... and no understanding of what "monkey.org" was or is. I've learned more reading the comments on this HN post than I did from the website.
This isn't to say monkey.org should change anything about what it's doing; it seems to be what it wants to be, and that's great. But a search engine isn't going to index that highly, because it generally answers nobody's questions about anything.
Sometimes I try to use DuckDuckGo more for this; to exit Google's filter bubble. I have at times thought the DDG search results are worse, but maybe it's just me unused to be served a tailor-made web, and the actual problem here is that I have grown sloppy and need to work on my search keywords from a "universal web" point of view...
Heh we need to bring back site rings. Those wacky footers where you would link up to a few other sites you liked. I found a lot of cool sites with those back in the late 90s.
Blog rolls were a thing too. Seems like tech blogs (mostly) all got eaten by Stackoverflow.
This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but why do you think sites such as these deserve any sort of high place on a search engine? The goal of a search engine is to present results which are -useful- to a user. These "independent web" sites are a neat relic at best and completely useless to the everyday user at worst.
Compared to the tens of millions of competing -useful- sites, they are markedly less deserving of a spot. In fact, it would be unfair to award one to them purely because they are "independent".
If Google were a book shop. You'd only see 10 books and usually the same ones. I guess that drive for more unique content comes from an older view of the net that was more ecsentric.
A bookstores a bad analogy. Maybe a fashion store.
If you're a heavy consumer of the net you probably hit the edges of your algorithmic fish bowl pretty regularly. I know I do and it's work to get out.
Actually, I'd so much like to see different things more often I'd consider turning ads back on if the service could be provided.
On the Amazon-CEO news yesterday, someone posted an interview of JB from 1997 [0]. In the first 2-3 minutes he explained exactly that (but for books). There are X million titles on books, they keep a tiny fraction of that in stock for 'next day delivery'. Kinda what Google does (or many search engines). Usually you find the 'most popular' answers on the first page. But when I have a tech problem, I have usually tried the 'first 5 pages' of solutions before I even try to duck it (DDG) for a solution (dear wikihow, yes I did restart my PC!).
I assume HN has the type of readers that already KNOW the first 10 pages of solutions, and thus need that tiny level of detail that one gets after digging deep (stackexchange, forums, etc.)
Question if anyone who knows: does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? I assume Google's crawlers can 'read' if a website is using X, Y, or Z advertiser's ads. (I haven't used Google for many many years and I usually block any google search and ads related IPs and URLs)(and ads in general).
The most accurate (sacrificing probability) answer is "Google's ranking algorithm is proprietary; nobody can independently verify whether they up-rank sites that display Google ads by looking at the source code." Attempts to figure that out from the outside via black-box testing are complicated by the simple ubiquity of Google ads; there's a lot of conflating signal that would have to be tuned out (even if one observes correlation between top search results and Google ads, one has to control for the probability that any random site has Google ads on it, or that ads pay for the SEO and information collection that tends to result in a site that ranks highly in Google results, or even the probability that a site without ads, having found itself high in the rankings because it's delivering data that Google concludes is valuable to users, wouldn't respond to that observation by putting Google ads on their site to capture money otherwise left on the table).
The Pareto principle suggests that the hypothetical Google bookstore, being maximally useful to the querying individual should be showing some ten books for any given query if those books successfully answer 80% of the questions.
A randomizing carousel is a different tool, which Google is not. Nor, to my knowledge, is DDG or Bing... They show a different set of ten books, but the same optimizing goals apply for their use cases.
Is anyone doing something like a search engine that intentionally surfaces rarer data (i.e. makes the tradeoff intentionally of "less likely to satisfy your query, but seen by fewer people")? I'm not aware of one.
What search terms should a site like this show up for? I poked around and all I found was short generic bios and links to social media and photo sites. I don't understand what searches should return a site like this, other than the person's name and some other identifying info (to disambiguate from the other 10 million Pauls).
One reason - because they are often genuine; not like most seo stuffed web with meaningless keywords trying to sell you something, show you a bunch of adds, get you subscribed and spam you etc etc
Fun, I remember that one of my colleagues at a previous startup had a @monkey.org email address. Went to check his LinkedIn and sure enough it says "founder at monkey.org". I'm surprised I remember this, it was 5 years ago. Guess the monkey.org domain is quite memorable indeed. If you're reading this, hi Dave!
Yep, memorable domain name. Maybe some monkey.org-HN crossover people will speak up with comments. Or maybe the first rule of Monkey Club is that they don't.
As someone who spent time in Ann Arbor in the mid 2000s I think most of the monkeys were very much in the infosec realm and were good ppl. I would be curious to know how it all started if @dugsong is around maybe someone can ping him to learn more :)
If I had to guess monkey.org was started around 1996, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a BBS before it moved online ;)
Many of the monkey.org and deathstar.org folks all worked for the same IT help desk at UofM which at the time was called "Facilities" best job I ever had. We are still looking for that stolen box of t-shirts!
It's not meant to be a joke, it's just the cyberspace equivalent of a private clubhouse for a group of tech people who live or went to college in Ann Arbor, MI. There are websites (and other services) hosted here, but it's not web hosting for the general public. You have to know someone to get an account here, and from what I can tell it's been mostly dormant for the last decade or longer.
I know and worked with several of the people on the users list. Great people, but I don't know why this is on the HN front page.
Morning, folks. Shidoshi@ (almost everywhere, including Monkey) here. This was quite funny to wake up to. I did ping Dug, Dave, and Jim this morning, so maybe one of them will drop in and give a history lesson.
If any of you are looking to join Niels and me at Stripe, do please drop me a note.
Yep that's the beauty of OpenSRS[0], anyone can become a domain registrar.. (I don't know for sure that monkey.org uses them but you could also start your own registar this way if you wanted to).
https://monkey.org/~provos/ Head of Sec @ Stripe, former Google, finder of websites with malware. And YouTuber blacksmith. The guy is bigger than life.
- Major contributor to openssh and making it ubiquitous
- Pushed OpenBSD forward back in the day. These guys, back in the day they will drive from Ann Arbor to Windsor, Canada to write code to get around the US crypto export.
It is kind of frustrating when everyone talks about this like it's this obviously famous thing, acting pretentiously, lamenting how there's nothing like it anymore, shunning everyone else - and it turns out it's basically a microculture from not just America, but a very specific location in America, from a very specific time. "Things were so much better back then, but you wouldn't get it you weren't there and I'm not going to let you understand". Gah.
If you want whatever this is to come back in spirit, stop lamenting at very turn and be more open, make friends, build stuff, or at the very least explain what's going on and share the magic, we're all interested in niche stuff here and who knows, maybe you'll get in touch with someone with the same brain frequency you're looking for.
I see that domain and immediately I’m back in the conference room at Usenix 2000 watching dugsong perform wizardry with dsniff during his lightning talk.
One time I watched dugsong hacking away at something on his laptop... he had drawn a crowd. I wonder what happened to all the monkey.org people... I imagine most are in the security world at this point.
I don't know why this is #4 on the front page, guess HN is bored tonight? monkey.org is a sort of loose collection of University of Michigan and/or Ann Arbor folks. Many of the people in the users section were early contributors to OpenBSD or went on to found and work for various startups in the area, some of which you've probably heard of.
As someone who has lived an hour away from Ann Arbor for his entire life, I find myself wandering over that way on a regular basis. As a teenager in the late 90’s and early 00’s the siren song of Pinball Pete’s, Middle Earth, Michigan/State Theaters, and Wizzywig (ESPECIALLY Wizzywig) were irresistible. I don’t remember how I came across monkey.org but I do remember there was a kind monkey who had scanned a great many of the menus from restaurants around town in a time when restaurants didn’t “Internet”. Ever since then I’d poke at monkey.org if I was really bored, and it’s been my go to test website.
These communities are really special. I was lucky enough to be a included in a few (though not this one directly), and if you are part of one, be generous to it and preserve it as best you can. People change and they won't always be the people you want to be like, but treat them like the ones you've got. Good on them that they're still cool.
According to a LinkedIn page, monkey.org is "The international house of primates, founded in 1995, offering services to a diversity of denizens across the globe. Headquartered around the world, we bring the brains and the brawn to many startup businesses and their associated acts around the globe."
Oh man... In which case, no hard feelings if this is deleted, mods!
I personally found the website intriguing as a proto-social network: it's a mysterious collection of people, whose photos and ramblings exude a certain sincerity, which I can't help but feel is violated by my mere stumbling on them!
> Either I'm a shut-in, or these people are very socially promiscuous.
The user list isn't particularly long, so I suspect more the former than the latter.
And the quote above doesn't mention friends, just people who know people. The word "friend" is massively overused these days, thanks Facebook, but that doesn't seem relevant here.
I don't know the exact history of the domain, but many of the accounts on it are OG arbor networks people (a DoD spinoff focused on volumetric ddos mitigation/traffic engineering, now part of Netscout). Those that weren't there originally were at least in their circle.
Also several were significant openbsd/openssh contributors back in the day.
I don't know anything specifically about monkey.org but I went to high school with the user "dros" in the late 90's when local BBS's (Grex and M-Net) were still kind of cool and it was even cooler to have your own.
PHS '99 here! I stuck around and ended at Netscout. Funnily enough, I was on a slack call earlier today with one user from monkey.org trying to figure out some bit of code from _another_ user on monkey.org :) tbf, the code was quite readable, but it wasn't in a language that I'm strong in.
I think Andy (dros) is a Linux filesystem contributor working at NetApp. Definitely interesting stuff from many of the monkey.org users all over the interwebs!
I miss the old goons I grew up idolizing. Wonder where they are now - with their children and their CTO positions.
Don’t take community or friends for granted. Y’all Monkeys are luckier than you know.