Internet Artifacts(neal.fun) |
Internet Artifacts(neal.fun) |
Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people from other places and speakers of other languages to make their own versions of this site.
And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has their own history. It's worth recording.
- bash.org.ru, IT and programmer humor site that produced some classic memes (I know of the American one, but this one was its own thing)
- Masyanya, popular flash cartoon series.
- Padonki internet slang, Russian that is distorted, misspelled and vulgar, similar to leetspeak.
Oh please yes create a version that applies to your cultural background and how you experienced the net!
As an American, I'd love to see this. Been online since AOL came on 3.5" floppies, but I know the US-centric version is only half the story. An example I was exploring recently was Tetetext which I have no memory of in the US. From what I understand, only a handful of bigger cities tried it and it simply was not that popular here. Growing up, we also had the perception that the BBC, in general, was a stuffy old news corp and had no real idea about the BBC Micro since Commodore and Atari dominated here. As an adult, it feels like I missed out on half the computing world back before things became a bit more interconnected.
If someone is up for making such a site, I'd be interested in watching or even contributing if I have anything valuable to offer.
I would also love to learn about the Chinese internet, which to this day is pretty closed to us.
There is a treasure trove of writings, jokes, stories, games, books, history in there we have no idea about...
now all the internet is basically an oligopoly, but in the late 90s and early 2000s there was much more variety, and any historiography of the early internet should consider that, indeed.
Posted in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013477 (71 comments)
I love you and want to meat you. Lets shag
By: tyler
The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.
0: https://geminiprotocol.net/
1: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
2: Gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
Heh. I've been around the block in terms of compulsively trying to find alternatives to the ill-fated world wide web, my friend. I've hosted content on many of them, too, including gemini, which I really liked.
This line really stuck out to me. I really miss that feeling of the old net too. It occurs to me that a lot of my usage of the modern net is chasing that old feeling - which is sadly largely absent.
Still, there's good left - the sincere self-expression is still out there - you just have to search in the cracks and niches.
The sad thing is that the modern internet has made the need for the "old school internet" worse. We need that refuge from the grift and the bullshit now more than we've ever needed it.
Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.
it's quite understandable. The video is in monochrome so very easy to display, the animation is smooth and the detail is not too demanding, so even on low resolution display you can tell it's Bad Apple
But for me this was a hit of pure nostalgia, flipping item to item. Almost like looking through an old photo album of memories you'd forgotten years back. Thanks Neal for putting it together.
Slightly fun fact - the original Space Jam site stayed intact until 2021!
https://web.archive.org/web/20210105185246/https://www.space...
Now, I totally get it.
So broken after just 4 years
>Google Analytics
https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )
It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.
By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1
Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories
Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
I was a freshman in college (Fall 1997) and the only music we had access to was either CDs or the radio.
Technically, you could download a .wav of a song but it was super slow (even on fast university networks) and they were huge so you couldn't save that many on the hard drives of the time.
One day, I hear multiple songs coming from my room. Songs that neither I nor my roommate had on CDs. And it clearly wasn't the radio as the songs kept switching quickly with no commercials.
I distinctly remember thinking "Wait, how is he doing that? He doesn't have those songs!"
Makes me wonder what technology is going to have that impact on my kids.
Did anyone else notice how the audio stops playing when you slide to the next screen, except for zombo.com? Haha.
Related Artifacts:
"Here comes another bubble" - https://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmNDym6CvQ (dotcom startup boom)
BonziBUDDY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy (predatory browser extension dressed up as your friend)
Digg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg (reddit predecessor)
RuneScape - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape / https://play.runescape.com/
Ultima Online - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online / https://uo.com
Demoscene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Warez - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups
I'm sure there were other notable phenomenons that didn't make the cut, what did I miss?
Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.
"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."
So he just reused his personal domain name for the product! https://orkut.com/
(the story at the time of what killed the "free" is that Unilever mailed in 19,000 forms; one for each of their registered trademarks)
> ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission.
The font was not correctly licensed either.
I never saw it mentioned in anything but the most derisive and mocking terms.
It certainly had wide audience awareness in its intended form, which is why the many comedy interpretations (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg probably being the most famous) came into being and worked so well.
Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
That would explain why they suddenly became reclusive: the leader doesn’t want the people with the money exposed to the outside world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
PS. Astalavista was also fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.
Nowadays if you are a dumbass teenager online, YouTube funnels you into some bizarre extremism political thing instead.
I got online around ~10 years old in ~1998 and got into web dev soon after. I remember using Geocities and Angelfire and FortuneWeb and all that but I do not remember this interactive 2D map. I do remember the various "communities" or neighborhoods but not this. Was it gone by this point or was I just so focused on the free hosting I never noticed?
It took me a long time to realize the web was so new back when I started out, less then a decade old itself. Pretty surreal to see where its gone.
The progressive loading of images in the “embedded browsers” is annoying though. I’m not sure if it’s because all images “load” at the same speed (this wasn’t true with dialup), or if it’s because the animation gets old very quickly.
Two students had already sold weed to each other over two decades prior.
Any way for me to find similar stuff? Just a good voice singing stuff, without music? I know acapella, and some of it is good, but I'm thinking of something more specific. Just one person singing without music I guess, something poetic.
Man Ask Jeeves was way overhead its time.
Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.
Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!
I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...
A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Napster, Limewire, Digg, GeoCities…to name a few
More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.
> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.
Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.
¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!
SpyMac → Slashdot → Digg → Reddit
Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a Reddit link.
* nav header; search (if you could figure out how to make it work)
* Table of contents
* main content pane
fun times!
(Although you may have read recently as I have that 50 years old seems to be peak happiness for people self-reporting happiness.)
It works OK for http web sites, but for https, it pops up an alert:
Netscape 7.0 and s.yimg.com cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms.
(this was for the Yahoo! page, it's the same message for other sites as well). I haven't tried anything else.
I also haven't tried (and don't plan to) using the bundled email client, which was the precursor to Thunderbird.
Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.
So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.
It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.
slyall claimed to be redirected to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ .
Were you maybe on Safari/iOS?
Using yet another machine and curl:
curl -vvv --insecure https://spacejam.com
< HTTP/2 301
< date: Fri, 16 May 2025 10:45:08 GMT
< content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
< content-length: 233
< location: https://www.spacejam.com/
< server: nginx
< cache-control: max-age=600
< expires: Fri, 16 May 2025 10:51:34 GMT
<
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/">here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
...
\* Connection #0 to host www.spacejamanewlegacy.net left intact
curl -vvv --insecure www.spacejamanewlegacy.net
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Date: Fri, 16 May 2025 10:46:53 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.4.62 () OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips
< X-Powered-By: PHP/8.0.30
< Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000
< Upgrade: h2,h2c
< Connection: Upgrade
< Location: https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
\* Connection #0 to host www.spacejam.com left intactYour request to http://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net is redirected to https://www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/ .
You never tried making a request to https://www.spacejam.com/ .
Go to https://reqbin.com/ and enter https://spacejam.com . It gives 1 redirect (to https://www.spacejam.com/ ) then HTML.
Reqbin receives an upgrade request to HTTP2, that it never follows.
Here's my full curl output. No redirect loop:
curl -vvv --insecure https://spacejam.com
* Rebuilt URL to: https://spacejam.com/
* Trying 75.2.104.223...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to spacejam.com (75.2.104.223) port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering h2
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS header, Certificate Status (22):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
* ALPN, server accepted to use http/1.1
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=California; L=Burbank; O=WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.; CN=www.spacejam.com
* start date: Jul 15 15:36:27 2024 GMT
* expire date: Aug 16 15:36:26 2025 GMT
* issuer: C=BE; O=GlobalSign nv-sa; CN=GlobalSign RSA OV SSL CA 2018
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: spacejam.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.52.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 07:29:29 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.4.62 () OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips
< X-Powered-By: PHP/8.0.30
< Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000
< Upgrade: h2,h2c
< Connection: Upgrade
< Location: https://www.spacejam.com/
< Content-Length: 0
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
<
* Curl_http_done: called premature == 0
* Connection #0 to host spacejam.com left intact
curl -vvv --insecure https://www.spacejam.com
* Rebuilt URL to: https://www.spacejam.com/
* Trying 52.87.20.172...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to www.spacejam.com (52.87.20.172) port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering h2
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS header, Certificate Status (22):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
* ALPN, server accepted to use http/1.1
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=California; L=Burbank; O=WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.; CN=www.spacejam.com
* start date: Jul 15 15:36:27 2024 GMT
* expire date: Aug 16 15:36:26 2025 GMT
* issuer: C=BE; O=GlobalSign nv-sa; CN=GlobalSign RSA OV SSL CA 2018
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.spacejam.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.52.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 07:30:35 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.4.62 () OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips
< X-Powered-By: PHP/8.0.30
< Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000
< Upgrade: h2,h2c
< Connection: Upgrade
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
<
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no">
<title>
Space Jam: A New Legacy | Official Site </title>
...
</body>
* Curl_http_done: called premature == 0
* Connection #0 to host www.spacejam.com left intact
</html>
curl -vvv --insecure www.spacejamanewlegacy.net
* Rebuilt URL to: www.spacejamanewlegacy.net/
* Trying 52.11.38.202...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to www.spacejamanewlegacy.net (52.11.38.202) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.spacejamanewlegacy.net
> User-Agent: curl/7.52.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 07:32:05 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
< Content-Length: 233
< Connection: keep-alive
< Server: nginx
< Location: https://www.spacejam.com/
< Cache-Control: max-age=600
< Expires: Wed, 21 May 2025 07:37:50 GMT
<
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.spacejam.com/">here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
* Curl_http_done: called premature == 0
* Connection #0 to host www.spacejamanewlegacy.net left intact
You mean Reqbin receives a response with an Upgrade: h2,h2c header? That's not exactly a request to upgrade. That's the server advertising that it supports those protocols for upgrading. The client is free to ignore them. Also, h2 is actually an invalid upgrade protocol, not listed in the standard:
https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-upgrade-tokens/http-up...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67583138/why-does-the-ht...
According to that SO post, Apache advertises Upgrade: h2, h2c in its responses, but if the client attempts to upgrade to h2, Apache ignores it. So I believe Reqbin is doing the correct thing in not upgrading to h2. As for upgrading to h2c, that also wouldn't be possible, because that header was sent in response to an https:// request, but h2c only makes sense when upgrading from an http:// request.