from Hacker News

Internet Artifacts

by mikerg87 on 5/13/25, 11:49 AM with 140 comments

  • by silisili on 5/15/25, 4:25 AM

    I'm not sure how younger folks would feel seeing this...perhaps that it's ugly, less useful, sparse. And they'd be a bit right.

    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...

  • by srvmshr on 5/15/25, 12:25 PM

    For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version

    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

  • by alexpotato on 5/15/25, 2:24 PM

    This was amazing and reminded me of the first time I heard an mp3.

    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.

  • by metadat on 5/15/25, 3:30 PM

    Lots of great memories beautifully bottled up and impeccably presented (as we've come to expect from Neal). I was hoping the million dollar homepage would be included, and wasn't disappointed. :-)

    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?

  • by jofzar on 5/15/25, 8:03 AM

    I was blown away with how great of a website and resource this was and the way that things loaded (to emulate old internet) then saw it was neal.fun

    Neal.fun always kills it with these things. Love them so much.

  • by jetrink on 5/15/25, 1:17 PM

    I jumped over to the Wikipedia page of early blogger Justin Hall to see what he's up to. He has another distinction that he can probably claim: The longest recorded gap between registering a domain and finally using it to start a business.

    "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."

  • by dspillett on 5/15/25, 11:15 AM

    WRT “You Wouldn't Steal a Car”:

    > ironically, the ad’s music was used without the creator’s permission.

    The font was not correctly licensed either.

  • by jrowen on 5/15/25, 8:29 AM

    Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with people in beds in different rooms.

    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.

  • by dev-slash-zero on 5/15/25, 6:45 AM

    I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly as late as 2010.

  • by lossolo on 5/15/25, 2:55 PM

  • by 3by7 on 5/15/25, 11:52 AM

    Missing the "under construction" gif, a visits counter, and... goatse.

  • by fragmede on 5/15/25, 6:06 AM

    Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music was updated in 2019. Forever ago in Internet years but more recent than the original.

  • by pests on 5/15/25, 6:11 AM

    > Geocities had an interactive 2D map, allowing users to navigate through these virtual spaces. (1994)

    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.

  • by forferdet on 5/15/25, 10:52 AM

    In terms of internet culture, newgrounds deserves a mention! Technically still up, but not the same, as with most things.

  • by maxehmookau on 5/15/25, 11:59 AM

    Cool, well there goes my afternoon to watch Strong Bad Emails.

  • by jmmv on 5/15/25, 3:15 PM

    Really cool website. I like the interactivity of every little artifact.

    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.

  • by pawanjswal on 5/15/25, 4:21 PM

    Crazy to think this humble network of 111 terminals basically sparked the entire internet revolution!

  • by drivers99 on 5/15/25, 4:40 PM

    It'd be interesting to see some early versions of wired.com. For a while, they had constantly changing visually impressive things going on that I didn't even know were possible with HTML / browsers of the time.

  • by spoonsort on 5/15/25, 5:51 PM

    That just reminded me of original 128MB MP3 players, loaded straight from Napster. Ironically, I still struggle to fill an average sized modern equivalent with 512GB, even with FLAC.

  • by oceansky on 5/15/25, 12:57 PM

    "It was responsible for one of the first online web purchases - A large pepperoni and mushroom pizza, with extra cheese."

    Two students had already sold weed to each other over two decades prior.

  • by garylkz on 5/15/25, 8:00 AM

    I remember researching about early era of internet while trying to make a game for a game jam about online shopping, and damn, it sure is a deep rabbit hole.

  • by archon1410 on 5/15/25, 2:47 PM

    The "first MP3", without the background music, and just the voice, sounds a lot better to me than the original I listened to on YouTube. I liked the MP3 more.

    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.

  • by pingou on 5/15/25, 2:52 PM

    How does Heaven's Gate server manage to stay online? Do they also update it to keep up with security patches or that isn't necessary?

  • by mrheosuper on 5/15/25, 5:33 PM

    > Appearing in 1997, Ask Jeeves revolutionized search by allowing users to make queries with natural language

    Man Ask Jeeves was way overhead its time.

  • by the_af on 5/15/25, 1:55 PM

    Very cool.

    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.

  • by BizarroLand on 5/15/25, 9:04 PM

    Les horribles Cernettes (the band pictured in "the first photo on the internet") have a music video on youtube for their song "Collider" if you want to hear it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf4bmANuR-c

  • by JohnKemeny on 5/15/25, 10:53 AM

  • by Dwedit on 5/15/25, 6:12 PM

    It mentions a few classic flash movies, but doesn't mention the Flash hosting site Newgrounds.

  • by accrual on 5/15/25, 6:55 PM

    This was fantastic. There are so many possible artifacts that could be covered. Would be cool if each year could be extended to include multiple artifacts! The "Ultimate Showdown" song is apparently still perfectly preserved in my mind. :)

  • by james_chu on 5/15/25, 12:59 PM

    Thank you for letting me see the development process of computers. This is an incredible experience, truly unforgettable. Seeing Yahoo from 1994 was amazing. The interactive exhibit is fantastic, and I really love this

  • by al_borland on 5/15/25, 5:00 AM

    The hours I wasted on that helicopter game. It was the Flappy Bird of its day.

  • by pbronez on 5/15/25, 12:19 PM

    Love Tom’s Diner, didn’t know it was used as an early mp3 benchmark.

  • by throwawaycities on 5/15/25, 11:29 AM

    History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, internet lore passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the lore ensnared a new bearer.

  • by mdb333 on 5/15/25, 9:06 PM

    surprised no mention of Craigslist? or is it not an "Internet artifact" because it remains in essentially its original form...?

  • by alnwlsn on 5/15/25, 12:53 PM

    It's a shame it ended right when I started. There's at least a generation or two or three of cool stuff between 2007 and now.

  • by bibelo on 5/15/25, 7:41 AM

    When I see Neal, I know it's gonna be Fun

  • by BargirPezza on 5/16/25, 3:53 PM

    The last comment on "The Jennifer Love Hewitt Guestbook" was:

    I love you and want to meat you. Lets shag

    By: tyler

  • by SchwKatze on 5/15/25, 2:21 PM

    Super cool!! I used to play a lot of flash games in my childhood, pure nostalgia

  • by james_chu on 5/16/25, 10:28 AM

    I really liked the early Reddit interface, did you guys like it too?

  • by casey2 on 5/15/25, 1:05 PM

    Shame that the Iphone killed the internet seems like it had potential

  • by joeframbach on 5/15/25, 8:02 PM

    When I think early 2000s I think Jagex Games Domain Castle.

  • by beezle on 5/16/25, 2:29 AM

    Didn't see any mention of the Yanoff list!

  • by ashishact on 5/15/25, 11:44 AM

    Beautiful. Would be helpful to see dates as well

  • by cainxinth on 5/15/25, 12:48 PM

    So fun! I adore everything this guy makes!

  • by simonlc on 5/15/25, 1:36 PM

    Was WASD even around back during doom2?

  • by Funes- on 5/15/25, 10:55 AM

    Nice site. I miss the pre social media, pre-hypercommercial, pre mass surveillance Internet of old. It was mostly the product of genuine, sincere self-expression. Now it feels and even works like an infomercial, a scam, everywhere you look, filled to the brim with grifters and corporations trying to take ahold of your attention (and money). It's disgusting and inefficient at almost anything you attempt to do on it because of that terrible fact. It used to serve as a refuge from all the ailments sprung out of the hypercapitalistic endeavours and otherwise fakeness of the modern world, and its enforcers: normies. For many, many years now, it's been the exact opposite: it's turned into the epitome of what it helped us escape from, and it permeates every moment of our waking lives, directly or indirectly.

    The site's list ends very appropriately with the iPhone's presentation in 2007. The beginning of the end.

  • by youheard on 5/15/25, 1:07 PM

    the site design is beautiful

  • by hoshikihao on 5/15/25, 5:34 PM

    very interesting

  • by OgsyedIE on 5/15/25, 10:22 AM

    As fun as the opportunity to reminisce about the likes of line rider was, I'm disappointed to see the omission of clippy, the wayback machine, livejournal, yahoo answers, something awful, google groups, xkcd, temple OS, stumbleupon, lycos, activex, toolbars, ytmnd, hypercam, winrar, Ted Stevens, slashdot and doubleclick.

    Some of them are more deserving of a slot than others.

  • by cyberax on 5/15/25, 4:32 AM

    I'm disappointed that Bad Apple!! is not there.

  • by lucyjojo on 5/15/25, 7:16 AM

    would be cool for it to be less west/america-centric.