Edit: A good list anyway. AOL dial tone and AOL CDs. Lol. Spent countless hours chatting to strangers on aol.
There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
Though it's still missing the Amiga, and macOS <10...
I like the idea, not what OP has done with it.
Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time.
Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.
This is what happens when people which didn't live the era try to write an article with LLM slop.
I remember loving Freetalk against Mcabber and now Profanity because it could autocomplete anything you entered, not just nicknames.
Hamachi was an amazing tool before they got bought, it made networking so easy for everyone; and you didn't even need to know what an IP was.
I didn't realize how addictive the "keep them alive" narrative was.
No wonder streaks work so well nowadays.
There is a lot to learn from the past.
- the liquid or fine powder must be inside of a can or bottle for alcoholic beverages.
- for best results secure 1 or more homie(s) to occupy the immediate vincinity.
- it is the reader's responsibility to comply with any applicable environmental or littering laws. pouring a 56k modem out to one's homie(s) near a sewer drain or natural water source could lead to contanimation.
Thanks to people I met there, I started tinkering more with computers. I had a lot of fun there when everyone else went to sleep.
> "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed
Be around me when I get a text... I have gotten some really wild looks when people recognize it. It's a bit of wtf which shifts to woah when it clicks in their head.
Fun chat with CEO last week
...now, the typewriter when you turned on the keyboard sound. Maybe that has to do with why I like mechanical keyboards.
Is there any plan to let users contribute entries or memories?
Tamagotchi is a good example: it’s no longer the late-90s phenomenon, but it’s definitely not dead.
A small status tag could help:
- shut down - zombie / technically alive - niche but active - spiritual successor exists
That would make the debates part of the site instead of just corrections in the comments.
Did anything really kill it? It was kind of just a fad in the late 90s and its still around, not as popular as its fad stages but still reasonably popular. We just got back from Japan last week, there is a newly opened "Tamagotchi Factory" shop which was packed. The kids each picked up one of the latest versions and have been playing with them every day.
People may be not crazy about it as they used to but they are definitely still a thing.
I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.
It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.
Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!
Use the new web to bring people back to the old web :)
(Or a newsletter ? RSS ?)
Thank you for the "dark mode", like the old days. 2 annoyances though :
- the flashing bright yellow banner is painful to the eyes
- and the fonts are very small on a phone screen — although a 300x zoom "fixed" this.
Minidisk is technically dead, but it still occasionally gets new releases, particularly from the vaporwave/y2k scene and needlejuice (they have Lemon Demon and the Friday night Funkin' soundtrack)
Pope's car?? I need a wiki to that information.
HomeRF - The wifi contender that was supposed to unify wireless networks across multiple device types.
Tivo - technically still around, but pretty much a zombie version of their former selves. (Maybe make an "I'm not dead yet!" section).
Gateway 2000 PCs -Their support line had a DJ, and they were everywhere until all of a sudden they were nowhere.
Optical Drives
Zip Drives - 100MB on a floppy! OMFG!!!11
Slashdot - Digg and Reddit's funky uncle.
Gateway was purchased by Acer, so it’s not like they just disappeared. Not any more than DEC, SBC, or Studebaker anyway. They were just absorbed.
Firefox/mac os, dark mode on.
Edit: no, dark/light doesn't seem to matter.
Edit 2: Time to go on a tangent.
I opened the site experimentally on my oled phone and while the grey on grey is still too low contrast, it's significantly more readable than on either my desktop or laptop monitor.
Is all this grey on grey fad a consequence of "designers" switching to 4k oleds even on the desktop?
I'm no designer so that's where I'd start at :)
Symbian OS ----
No, Microsoft bought Nokia phone division, killed the brand and the OS (they published two updates called Anna and Bella and bricked my N8), published Lumia, some guy kept saying "devs devs devs" but nobody bought it.
Fsck microslop.
Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.
The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.
Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.
Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
Email, now with multiple validations and verifications.
Gopher protocol has a niche community (probably overlapping with newer Gemini).
Doom, still played and modded, and now a semi-meme benchmark for low-spec hardware.
Countless *nix tools that originated decades ago and evolved.
Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this:
Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!
Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I think that's what they mean.
This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.
And few people used the ISP mailbox because you couldn't take it with you when you left. Hell, I got my gmail during the invite only era
Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
Some ISPs from back in the day did offer a few megs of space for a web site with a ~username url that you could use to build a personal site. But by the late 90s this practice began to wane as services like GeoShitties became the norm.