▲ 338 points
back
71 comments
Note that many of the artifacts are interactive: buttons and links are clickable (effectful within the museum, does not leave page), text is scrollable, videos play, etc
Fantastic work.
That explains why I couldn't see LOL (lol!)
Try the Napster download button. Love it.
I'm virtually certain the audio clip that plays when you connect to AOL Dial-Up is not a modem from 1991. To my ear it sounds like a 28.8 or 33.6 modem
flips table
@Begin(Comic Book Guy) worst website ever @End
Well, it says connected at 52kbps... and the handshake was pretty short, I think it may be a 56k accelerated handshake that could happen if the line characteristics were similar to a previous call. Not sure if that's in all of x2/kflex/v.90/v.92, but it's in some of them.
They should add to the emoji page a blurb about them also being called "emoticons." I remember a big debate about this, and we collectively decided to call them emojis.
Also, the helicopter game was going around on DOS well before 2002. I was playing that around 1993 on a Gateway 386.
Emoji and emoticons are not the same thing.
Emoticons are things like :) or :D which can be done purely in ASCII. Emoji are actual pictures.
I loved that game. Played it on my 8086 with CGA graphics in the early 1990s.
Check this out:
> Chopper Commando, a DOS game written by Mark Currie using Turbo Pascal in 1990
After learning that his experiment had gone awry, Morris asked a friend to anonymously relay an apology and instructions for removing the worm to internet users
I'm like 80% sure this friend was Paul Graham.
They are missing Altavista, Stick Figure Death, and a few more.
And telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
CMU's Internet Confessional Booth was great reading, too.
I recall there was a dropdown for confessing "fish in microwave", which was the original sin that inspired the CMU grad students who created it.
Here's Bennet Yee's old page at CMU (last update 4 April 1996) with a link to it and other classic stuff, but it's long gone and not in the internet archive:
FJ!!! was way ahead of the curve in 1998 with his fuzzy PHKL: Pink Hello Kitty Laptop.
https://web.archive.org/web/20011212120420/http://www.exonom...
Buffy's Swearing Keyboard
https://www2.b3ta.com/buffyswear/
VRML, MIDI players,
Maybe the Museum accepts donations of artifacts.
"The Whitehouse Page"
I had to read that to ensure it was talking about Whitehouse.gov and not Whitehouse.com - the latter of which fooled many-a-schoolteacher in the 90s.
I had that thought too! I double checked the URL. I remember my friends trying desperately to convince me to go to the .com and I refused because they were so obviously suspicious.
Please add SomethingAwful and 4chan :)
needs moar yellow van https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkAngvkWVkk
> 4chan
In that vein, I would have expected 2ch[1] to be included in the list of artifacts. 2ch inspired 2chan[2], which inspired 4chan later. 2ch is an enormous anonymous bulletin board system that was home to many communities.
definitely seems very like in the post-2000s section, especially considering the exponential growth of the internet (that it itself alludes to), it seems to focus a lot more on the pre-2000 content, with a small handful of misc stuff from after.
I with the website used proper URLs so it would be possible to use permalinks as a reference for individual items...
Good news for you - it does (for some parts).
Once you reach the Internet era, you can copy/paste the links within the embedded browser to access them directly. e.g.: https://internet-artifacts.neal.fun/sites/y2k/index.html
It's also using a color scheme that's almost unreadable here with dark reader. Will check again in the morning lol
> The reaction to the [first spam] email was overwhelmingly negative: one user claimed it broke his computer system, and the US Defense Communications Agency called his company to complain. >>Thuerk claims he sold $13 to $14 million worth of mainframe computers through the campaign<<.
(>>emphasis mine<<)
It was truly a sign of things to come, and an answer to why we can't have nice things.
I hate to be that guy, but the smiley/emoticon was invented on the PLATO platform circa 1972
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPjEJH...
The CDC hardware platform didn't adapt to personal computing architectures, but many of the PLATO alumnus went on to futures with PARC and Apple.
This is probably going to spark a dumb argument that's been done to death, but aren't emoticons typographical based? Those look like pictograms or arguably early emoji.
Link broken. But I read about Plato in that book the Happy Orange Glow or something like it. Didn't make it all the way through but it sounded groundbreaking
Man reading through the early 2000s part made me sad. The internet isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be.
No "Punch the Monkey"?
https://twitter.com/meyerweb/status/1454563559577370635?lang...
When you get to Napster (1999), be sure to interact with it and download a song.
In the middle of the ARPANET map at the beginning, there's a node right in the middle called "SCOTT". I tried Googling for what this node was and didn't come up with much. Why was the node called Scott? Was it run by a guy named Scott? Or is that an acronym for some institution?
If it's a person, how and why did Scott have a PDP-11?
Helicopter game! I'd forgotten about that.
Club Penguin. I was so very very happy when that shut down. I - and others - were doing Support at wordpress.com. Kids (I assume) constantly exploiting other kids to get into their accounts. Kids doing anything to get traffic, using popunder scripts and more.
Helicopter game gave me flashbacks. IIRC my high score was around 44,000.
ALong side that I'd hall of fame a "3d pong" game which was available only in "Macromedia shockwave". Impossible to even find a screenshot of it now, it was beautiful 3d for its time.
Need to add Mahir - I Kiss You!
I love this, plenty of things I'd forgotten about in there presented in a way non-needs like me (us) might appreciate too.
I think there should be an every l entry for ICQ.
Doesn't work on my phone, the top half of the "slides" are cut off. (My phone probably belongs in a museum, though...)
I think HN should come up with its own Internet Artifact Museum :)
I'm happy to collab if folks want to.
Man, I'm really feeling the enshitification of the internet right now. Those early to mid years were great.
1989 and 1991 seem to be on the wrong tabs. It looks like they traded places.
And its a single page app.
Waves and waves of nostalgia <3 thanks, this is wonderful
Reminds of how slack was/is an IRC clone
favicon should really be netscape navigator
i always loved seeing stuff like this. it's a pretty neat.
Well done !!!
"In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the initial proposal for the World Wide Web, envisioning it as a "universal linked information system" to help researchers share information."
Statement of Facts
Idea: Let's use this system to disseminate advertising.
Idea: Let's use this system to run code automatically on peoples' computers.
Idea: Let's use this system as a means for people to communicate with their family and friends over the internet by uploading their "private" messages to a third party's website.
Idea: ???
Universal linked information system --> universal internet surveillance system
Question
Is the web still suitable to help researchers share information if so-called "tech" companies intermediate access to all information and seek to commercialise all web use.