Internet nostalgia

Remember when?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxM8C71GB8w

caught an old episode of Buffy the other day. Here is a joek I hope to use soon:
"I met him online."
"On line for what?"

Unable to connect to SQL server. TURN BACK YOU POXY FULE

xp Requires you be in New York, though, doesn't it?

what if I use a new york accent?

It's like FIDONet, but with more bandwidth and faster response times.

And if you get this browser thing called Mosaic, you can do all kinds of neat shit. But it's a resource hog and you'll want to be running a Solaris workstation or a UNIX box.

If you don't want people to know what sites you've been surfing to, simply delete the .HST file.

Sticking to Gopher myself.

http://screenshots.en.softonic.com/en/scrn/39000/39464/2t_netscape_logo_150.jpg

"Can you get off the internet? I need to make a phone call."

http://chaco.laberintobbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/LegendOfTheRedDragon.gif

omg is that a MUD?

sad dad in video writing himself emails from his daughter jill at college

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Ah, that brings me back.

anyone who says they didnt hum along to that shit is a fucking liar

or a balanced individual, one of the two

SHAREWARE

ICQ

browsers w/o tabs

http://i56.tinypic.com/20f2as9.jpg

browsers w/o tabs

omg

don't bring me back to that world

having to get off the internet to use the phone

omg

*shivers*

"Can you get off the internet? I need to make a phone call."

― markers, Friday, October 1, 2010 9:35 PM (29 minutes ago)

;-)

unreg ilxors

http://stopthecap.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/prodigy-online.jpg

http://www.ethomaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/palace.gif

Referred by: Just Surfed On In!

http://www.qweas.com/downloads/games/puzzle-word-games/scr-snood.jpg
http://i.iinfo.cz/s/87/4285-icy-tower.gif

also

fake cybersex in AOL chatrooms

dudes i love snood

SNOOD CHARACTERS POLL

popup ads

(the ones that actually open a child window)

<font></font> tags

the Yahoo directory

I have had a problem when trying to reminisce about Prodigy. Lots of people don't remember it or didn't know it in the first place. So trying to say something like, "I loved trolling the Prodigy message boards when I was 12" gets this look in response, a look that says 'you think you were a genius kid or something?'

snood was not 'internet' jordan, also i have it on my computer RIGHT NOW

lol abbott. my most prominent memory involving prodigy is stumbling upon a wheel of time forum and having no idea wtf wheel of time was at the age of 9

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

300 baud acoustic modem -- you dial the phone -- I mean, with a DIAL -- and then press the handset into the cradle. Now that was Internet.

dudes, i'm playing snood right now

for my 8th algebra class ('95) i had a bearded, yet relatively young (35-ish) grateful dead fan "hippie" algebra teacher named mr. whitaker. mr. whitaker was really fond of "abtract" mathematical concepts such as fractals. he had lots of fractals posters in the classroom. one day, as a way to encourage us to fool around with The 'Net and thereby enrich the part of our brains that abstract mathematical concepts live in, mr. whitaker told us he'd kick us down us a few extra credit points if we could manage to successfully transmit to him, via the inter net, one (1) electronic mail aka E-MAIL. a few months prior, i'd convinced my dad to buy us an account with a local dial-up ISP, and i was already relatively savvy with it, so it was really no hassle at all. as it turned out, i was the only one in the class sophisticated/advantaged enough to have access to such technology at this time, and mr. whitaker was kind enough to point that out to everyone as he wrote my little extra credits down in the gradebook.

first time watching a video on the internet: some sort of 1 minute video about a space shuttle from NASA which took several hours to download and only played for a few seconds before crashing computer

oh man, that's fantastic

Another 1994 clip. Note how proud Crow is of the setup he describes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GoMoeV3Y4A

"And you think that'll make you happy, huh."

"YES."

you're a liar Z S and I don't believe you, unless 'space shuttle from NASA' is code for 'nude scene from fast times at ridgemont high'

it's the truth! bonus pr0n anecdote, though, is not knowing how to delete search history (or knowing that you could delete it, or knowing that it existed)and getting called out by dad - "...and tell me, what exactly is "hotsexvideos.com"?

good account of what Internet use was like right before Berners-Lee and why the web initially seemed to be more of an incremental change than a transformation

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses

The official Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich website is looking a bit internet nostalgia:

http://www.dddbmt.com

Came across this site when doing some important Beatles research:

https://sentstarr.tripod.com/beatgirls/first.html

Love it.

Somehow never knew about Rory Storm's macabre fate. Amongst the pleasant reminiscences of Liverpool Art College and the Cavern,

While Rory was at Stormsville comforting his mother Vi, he overdosed on a mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol. he died on 28th September 1972, and his mother committed suicide upon finding him.

Never seen Rory Storm before. Somehow I expected him to look more like Mal Evans that this, rather startling figure who looks like he's stepped out of the Blitz club in 1980. Photo by Astrid Kirchherr, which helps, I guess.

https://i.imgur.com/JgCa8qW.jpeg

you know what I miss, those little custom link buttons that everyone made. used to be people would connect via forums and they'd exchange buttons and put 'em on the "links" section of their webpage. they were all so ugly but I miss 'em

i stumbled on something that still had its "web ring" materials in place recently, it was like opening up a buried ruin and breathing air trapped centuries ago.

I miss (permanently) under construction pages with the little digging stick figure. Maybe 24 years later he’s still digging.

Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.

Oh, how lovely. Except the phallic lighthouse, maybe.

hypnospace outlaw is a great little detective game rooted in that 'webring' era of internet- pretty clever conceit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4Jul496QE

it's also really *funny*. recommended

http://www.cwgsy.net/community/tosy/images/rabbit2.gif

well damn

Here is a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's

(Just randomly found this when clicking "surprise me" at the Wiby site linked above.)

https://anlucas.neocities.org/petrape.gif

Wiby and button page are both great finds!

Yeah that "surprise me" button is endlessly entertaining.

https://i.imgur.com/LkM5Fu6.jpeg

Love to see an internet nostalgia site that’s still being regularly updated, complete with guest book and all.

All you Beatles and solo Beatles needs:

https://jpgr.co.uk/beatroot.html

Great find, reminds me of SugarMegs: http://sugarmegs.org

Rediscovering the Small Web

logging on to the nbc supernet pic.twitter.com/Vl3HNYzOz8

— no (@n0wak) April 8, 2022

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/09/way-back-in-1989-usa-today-launched-an-online-sports-service-i-found-it-at-goodwill/

Wow

Had some new thoughts...

https://www.patreon.com/posts/look-back-part-1-111028261

love it, Ned.
Discovering the internet is intertwined with Suede online chats for me. My first email addresses were puns on Suede and Modern Life Is Rubbish tracks. Hardly anyone was online, especially not other British people...

Discovering the internet is intertwined with Suede online chats

I fell for an Australian girl who had an email address before anyone else I knew.. she also had Suede CD's on her floor
Like 1994-95

Early discussion on whether to get the internet:

My mum - Do you know if it's even worth it? Are there enough interesting sites?

Me - Mum there are millions of sites, everything has a site *picks up magazine and turns to ad page* like see here, 7up has a site!

Mum - Well but why would you want to visit the 7up website?

mum otm

when my dad asked me what was on the internet in the mid-90s, the only thing i could think of was "....uh, like photos of airplanes and stuff!"

I remember when every shrub, hedge and creek in the nation were littered with AOL startup discs

it was an absolute environmental holocaust

yeah between that, OJ Simpson, and Monica Lewinsky, you were pretty set as a stand up comic in those days

Rather than zodiac signs, I like to picture people's personality and fates tied to media releases, so if you were born in 1997, you were born in the Year of Titanic, but if you were born in 1996, you were born in the Year of Mr T Ate My Balls

when my dad asked me what was on the internet in the mid-90s, the only thing i could think of was "....uh, like photos of airplanes and stuff!"

There's a 'red eye' joke in this but needs some work

Eight million jokes in this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z7kVH9xePM

aww, that was cute. my old Internet friends!

Red Letter Media recently pointed out that there have been some good, original films this year, but no-one went to see them*, and in the process they mentioned that Minecraft was the first "meme" movie. The comments corrected them by pointing out that Snakes on a Plane also attracted an internet buzz back in... whenever it came out. 2006. Albeit that I don't remember anybody back in 2006 throwing snakes at Samuel Jackson. Or disrupting screenings by releasing snakes into the theatre. Or deliberately hijacking airliners and crashing them into a snake farm.

* e.g. Companion, which is a riff on Ex Machina that grossed around $30m.

Which got me to thinkin' if there were any earlier internet meme movies, but I can't come up with anything. I remember that Swordfish attracted a bit of press (beyond Halle Berry's chest) because the villainous plot was to steal stock options, or something like that - it was written during the height of the dot.com boom - but that wasn't really an internet meme thing. Ditto the likes of Hackers and Virtuosity etc, neither of which seemed to have been written by people who actually used the internet for anything beyond email. Ally McBeal had the dancing baby and that was millions of years ago. Murphy Brown had references to Dan Quayle from the Civilization games, but he was an actual person.

Still, I find it heartening that NASA's Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is still online in more or less the same form it was in the mid-1990s:
https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/index.html

It uses the plainest of plain HTML. It predated frames. It predated CSS. It did not sanction that buffoonery. Along with the slightly newer Apollo Flight Journal it's a rare example of an ancient website that's still readable and actually useful.

Emoji Movie?

Emoji Movie released well after Snakes On A Plane - I think there's quite a few you could cite in between 2006 and now, but can't think of much pre '06, think maybe internet culture hadn't become sufficiently hegemonic yet?

The Room was 2003 but I think the internet meme status came later?

I'm not sure how we're defining "meme" movie, but The Blair Witch Project generated a lot of buzz because of its website (1999 headline: "'Blair Witch' Proclaimed First Internet Movie")

cf. famously unchanged (until 2021) Space Jam website

iirc The Room didn't take off until like...2011 or so. I definitely heard about it before that but it was mostly related to that mysterious billboard in LA that stayed up for nearly a decade.

Snakes on a Plane was a pretty interesting phenomenon, because it was hard to overstate how much you heard about it, not just online either. even the people who couldn't shut up about it got sick of it before the movie even came out. and the movie itself, as I recall, did not actually perform particularly well. it turns out people weren't really interested in it beyond Sam Jackson's "motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line. Which doesn't even make sense in the context of the movie! you could so clearly tell what was added in after the title of the movie went viral. anyway I suspect its poor performance saved us from an entire generation of idiotic meme movies. I think it's really hard to make something go 'viral' organically when you've got hundreds of people working on it.

Morbius was the best case scenario for this, imo - dogshit unsuccessful film gets ironically championed online, studio goes "o shit we gotta cash in" and rereleases it...and no one goes to see it.

yea I was genuinely proud of the internet for that one

I remember that Scott Pilgrim vs The World and Sucker Punch both seemed to have been specifically formulated to appeal to Hollywood's idea of the stereotypical internet user circa 2010/2011, breathe in - e.g. weak man-children and lolicon-obsessed paedophiles respectively. Notably the main TVTropes entry for both films are so long they're subdivided into subsections, because those two films captured the hearts of the people who wrote TVTropes back then.

But along with Kick-Ass 2 they didn't make any money, so I have the impression that Hollywood backed off internet-targeted movies for a while. And yet apparently there are no less than two Kick-Ass sequels sitting on hard drives awaiting release, so what do I know?

Scott Pilgrim a pretty straight adaptation of the comic, which in turn yes did pander a fair amount to nerd culture - the mainstreaming of which I'm sure the internet had a lot to do with, but I don't think of it as a meme film or "internet" film. At any rate you'd have a tough time suggesting that pandering to nerds hasn't worked out commercially for Hollywood.

Worth pointing out that Ain't It Cool News went online in 1996 - adding whatever flammable material there is to internet nerd rage or internet nerd love.