Internet nostalgia

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Remember when?

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

Ned Raggett, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:08 (fourteen years ago)

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?"

elephant rob, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:09 (fourteen years ago)

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

Myonga Vön Bontee, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:17 (fourteen years ago)

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

jaymc, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:19 (fourteen years ago)

what if I use a new york accent?

elephant rob, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:20 (fourteen years ago)

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

Aimless, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:27 (fourteen years ago)

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.

Aimless, Friday, 1 October 2010 18:31 (fourteen years ago)

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

Les centimètres énigmatiques (snoball), Friday, 1 October 2010 21:02 (fourteen years ago)

Sticking to Gopher myself.

Brad C., Friday, 1 October 2010 21:30 (fourteen years ago)

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

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:34 (fourteen years ago)

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

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:35 (fourteen years ago)

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

homosexual II, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:36 (fourteen years ago)

omg is that a MUD?

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:38 (fourteen years ago)

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

ice cr?m, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:39 (fourteen years ago)

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

ice cr?m, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:41 (fourteen years ago)

Ah, that brings me back.

http://tinyurl.com/hommphommp (Pleasant Plains), Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:43 (fourteen years ago)

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

ice cr?m, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:49 (fourteen years ago)

or a balanced individual, one of the two

ice cr?m, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:49 (fourteen years ago)

SHAREWARE

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:55 (fourteen years ago)

ICQ

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 01:59 (fourteen years ago)

browsers w/o tabs

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:00 (fourteen years ago)

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

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:00 (fourteen years ago)

browsers w/o tabs

omg

don't bring me back to that world

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:02 (fourteen years ago)

having to get off the internet to use the phone

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:02 (fourteen years ago)

omg

*shivers*

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:03 (fourteen years ago)

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

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

;-)

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:06 (fourteen years ago)

unreg ilxors

elan, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:06 (fourteen years ago)

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

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:07 (fourteen years ago)

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

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:07 (fourteen years ago)

Referred by: Just Surfed On In!

zvookster, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:08 (fourteen years ago)

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

waka flocka flame judi dench (J0rdan S.), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:17 (fourteen years ago)

also

fake cybersex in AOL chatrooms

waka flocka flame judi dench (J0rdan S.), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:18 (fourteen years ago)

dudes i love snood

Honey, I squirted jizz all over the baby (the table is the table), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:19 (fourteen years ago)

SNOOD CHARACTERS POLL

waka flocka flame judi dench (J0rdan S.), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:20 (fourteen years ago)

popup ads

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:25 (fourteen years ago)

(the ones that actually open a child window)

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:25 (fourteen years ago)

<font></font> tags

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:25 (fourteen years ago)

the Yahoo directory

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:26 (fourteen years ago)

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?'

Mormons come out of the sky and they stand there (Abbbottt), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:26 (fourteen years ago)

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

ice cr?m, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:28 (fourteen years ago)

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

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:39 (fourteen years ago)

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.

Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:46 (fourteen years ago)

dudes, i'm playing snood right now

Honey, I squirted jizz all over the baby (the table is the table), Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:59 (fourteen years ago)

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.

del griffith, Saturday, 2 October 2010 02:59 (fourteen years ago)

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

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:03 (fourteen years ago)

oh man, that's fantastic

markers, Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:11 (fourteen years ago)

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

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

Ned Raggett, Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:15 (fourteen years ago)

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

"YES."

Ned Raggett, Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:16 (fourteen years ago)

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'

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (dayo), Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:16 (fourteen years ago)

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"?

i'm gonna be straight with y'all, my name is banaka jones (Z S), Saturday, 2 October 2010 03:22 (fourteen years ago)

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

Brad C., Saturday, 22 February 2020 14:01 (five years ago)

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

http://www.dddbmt.com

Alba, Thursday, 5 March 2020 20:12 (five years ago)

one year passes...

Came across this site when doing some important Beatles research:

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

Alba, Wednesday, 8 December 2021 20:22 (three years ago)

Love it.

Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 9 December 2021 10:31 (three years ago)

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.

Luna Schlosser, Thursday, 9 December 2021 14:32 (three years ago)

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

Alba, Thursday, 9 December 2021 19:57 (three years ago)

two months pass...

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

frogbs, Tuesday, 15 February 2022 05:09 (three years ago)

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.

The creator of Ultra Games, for Nintendo (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 15 February 2022 13:30 (three years ago)

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

Johnny Mathis der Maler (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, 15 February 2022 14:37 (three years ago)

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

Alba, Tuesday, 15 February 2022 15:41 (three years ago)

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

global tetrahedron, Tuesday, 15 February 2022 15:46 (three years ago)

it's also really *funny*. recommended

global tetrahedron, Tuesday, 15 February 2022 15:46 (three years ago)

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

Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 16 February 2022 05:40 (three years ago)

well damn

Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 16 February 2022 05:41 (three years ago)

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.)

visiting, Wednesday, 16 February 2022 07:46 (three years ago)

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

kinder, Wednesday, 16 February 2022 16:25 (three years ago)

Wiby and button page are both great finds!

The creator of Ultra Games, for Nintendo (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, 16 February 2022 19:04 (three years ago)

Yeah that "surprise me" button is endlessly entertaining.

Kim Kimberly, Wednesday, 16 February 2022 23:50 (three years ago)

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

Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, 16 February 2022 23:59 (three years ago)

two weeks pass...

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

Alba, Monday, 7 March 2022 22:30 (three years ago)

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

blatherskite, Tuesday, 8 March 2022 14:48 (three years ago)

Rediscovering the Small Web

Kim Kimberly, Sunday, 13 March 2022 05:29 (three years ago)

three weeks pass...

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

— no (@n0wak) April 8, 2022

Ned Raggett, Friday, 8 April 2022 23:50 (three years ago)

five months pass...

Wow

Misirlou Sunset (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 2 October 2022 20:29 (two years ago)

one year passes...

Had some new thoughts...

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

Ned Raggett, Friday, 30 August 2024 17:56 (nine months ago)

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...

kinder, Friday, 30 August 2024 18:39 (nine months ago)

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

Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, 30 August 2024 18:47 (nine months ago)

five months pass...

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?

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 3 February 2025 20:59 (four months ago)

mum otm

visiting, Monday, 3 February 2025 21:29 (four months ago)

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!"

z_tbd, Monday, 3 February 2025 21:52 (four months ago)

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

it was an absolute environmental holocaust

Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, 3 February 2025 21:59 (four months ago)

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

frogbs, Monday, 3 February 2025 22:06 (four months ago)

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

Philip Nunez, Monday, 3 February 2025 22:27 (four months ago)

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

nashwan, Monday, 3 February 2025 22:29 (four months ago)

two months pass...

Eight million jokes in this one.

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

Ned Raggett, Saturday, 19 April 2025 15:50 (one month ago)

aww, that was cute. my old Internet friends!

Doctor Casino, Monday, 21 April 2025 11:42 (one month ago)

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.

Ashley Pomeroy, Monday, 21 April 2025 17:39 (one month ago)

Emoji Movie?

budo jeru, Monday, 21 April 2025 17:59 (one month ago)

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?

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 21 April 2025 18:05 (one month ago)

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

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 21 April 2025 18:08 (one month ago)

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")

jaymc, Monday, 21 April 2025 18:08 (one month ago)

cf. famously unchanged (until 2021) Space Jam website

encino morricone (majorairbro), Monday, 21 April 2025 18:29 (one month ago)

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.

frogbs, Monday, 21 April 2025 18:32 (one month ago)

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.

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 21 April 2025 18:38 (one month ago)

yea I was genuinely proud of the internet for that one

frogbs, Monday, 21 April 2025 18:40 (one month ago)

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?

Ashley Pomeroy, Monday, 21 April 2025 22:23 (one month ago)

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.

a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, 21 April 2025 22:49 (one month ago)

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.

Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 22 April 2025 06:13 (one month ago)


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