i recently got inspired by one content creator i like to create small personal site for no one but myself, just as an hobby, this is much more expressive and fun than any kind of social media we have now, doing it out of passion and not internet points numbers going up, this is something modern web is missing, nowadays it's really hard to find personal sites as search engines are showing you what they want you to see and now what you want to see.
I really know what you are trying to describe. I was born in 1989 and one of the coolest things growing up was when the internet & computers got to the point where you could find extremely unique websites that just seemed to be passion projects made by someone creative and with talent. It was even more impressive at that time because it was actually pretty rare for someone to have the skill and knowledge of how to create something like that. Some sites had very creative art, or moving interactive things that you could influence how it moved by moving your mouse pointer over the region of the screen. I wish I could remember this one site I used to visit all the time around the early 2000's. I think it was around when "the digital blasphemy" was around or slightly before it. Idk if it was a Shockwave kinda site or something but The site would let you click thru a bunch of different abstract interactive art objects such as a school of fish or a bunch of Sperm looking things that if you move your mouse over it, it actually had pretty well made movement feedback controls. There was a bunch of other options that were interactive but they didn't stick in my memory so well. Besides this site, there was so many other obscure things that I sadly didn't log into my memory in a solid way.
@@benmcreynolds8581 85 here. I remember PAYING to upload videos to geocities on DIAL UP. I was an OG beta tester for TH-cam in 2005! Yet they terminated my fan account after 15 years without any rationale given.
As somebody who grew up in the 1990's and 2000's in a small farm town, I didn't get into the old web as much as others, but from when I did get on via middle school computer class, it was special. I knew it would eventually explode, but not quite to this extent.
I miss web rings and those big top 100 sites and each had some wacky banner ads for each site. Where you just stumble down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
I was 12 when we first got an internet connection in 1998. I feel so much nostalgia and have really good memories of the years that followed. It really was like a different world back then, compared to how sterile and corporatized much of the online experience is today. It's hard to really explain in words but it was a special time to be online. Im glad that efforts have been made to try and preserve the old internet as it was. Also, it's great that we have content creators, like Debunk and others, who explore some of those old sites and try to bring a little of that experience to those ppl who didn't get to witness it all firsthand. Thank you for this!
I'm old, I've been online for many years. 97-2010 was peak internet. Since 2010 the Internet has taken a nose dive. It's really sad. You use to be able to lose hours and hours just check out cool new stuff and dig into crazy rabbit holes. Now it's youtube, Instagram, facebook, Twitter, then back to youtube on over again. The Internet use to be mind simulating now it mind melting. It's the dumbing down of everything for the sole purpose of dumbing down society.
I really know what you are trying to say. I was born in 1989 and one of the coolest things growing up was when the internet & computers got to the point where you could find extremely unique websites that just seemed to be passion projects made by someone creative and with talent. It was even more impressive at that time because it was actually pretty rare for someone to have the skill and knowledge of how to create something like that. Some sites had very creative art, or moving interactive things that you could influence how it moved by moving your mouse pointer over the region of the screen. I wish I could remember this one site I used to visit all the time around the early 2000's. I think it was around when "the digital blasphemy" was around or slightly before it. Idk if it was a Shockwave kinda site or something but The site would let you click thru a bunch of different abstract interactive art objects such as a school of fish or a bunch of Sperm looking things that if you move your mouse over it, it actually had pretty well made movement feedback controls. There was a bunch of other options that were interactive but they didn't stick in my memory so well. Besides this site, there was so many other obscure things that I sadly didn't log into my memory in a solid way. It really would be nice if we could see more of a blend of both worlds nowadays. Taking the best aspects of each time. I don't understand why so many things have fazed out nowadays into this bland, soulless, minimalistic approach to a lot of things in modern society..
YT & Odysee are probably the only sites I would miss if I was suddenly back on IRC in '01 or so... Also I'm happy not having to wait an hour for a .rm file or downloading 128kbs mp3 over some strangers ftp. (But I appreciated the .rm video or the 128kbs mp3 more for it.)
When I was a little kid, I actually used the internet to find folks to be pen pals with... Via snail mail. :) I'm 39 and still have that stack of letters from all over the world.
Hell yeah I love this stuff man the early internet was a wild place but there’s something so cozy about it also. It was very creative due to restrictions
The subtle risk of seeing something cursed arguably enhanced the excitement. Yeah, you might find something you'll wish you never saw, but odds are pretty good you'll mostly forget it and discover something awesome that you spend the next few days poring over. I recall an old HTML-based mine cart game that I stumbled across exactly once in my life that scared me. Now, I wonder what it was and if I ever saw it at all. Shout outs to Internet "phone books" that existed during the turn of the millennium for the lists of random websites in paperback book format.
wonderful always 1 step ahead, i'm 34 didn't use the internet until i was 14-ish. I was rather poor as a kid but i remember parts of the old internet that still lingered and some of these are rather nostalgic from Scotland with love
Finally, I came across with your channel again. All I remember from your channel is that iconic intro music, and now, I need to keep the name of your channel on my mind because of this quality uploads from you!
1:35 I've been using the internet since 1996. Realizing there is a generation's worth of people who never experienced the old net is eye-opening to me. The thing is, there are people who have been using it before I was even born in 1984. Bulletin Board Systems and Usergroups were a subculture onto themselves from the late 70s through the early 90s.
Newsgroups! It is fascinating to think about. So many memories, whole lives and friendships, etc., took place in this digital domain and are long gone and forgotten. Obviously, that's more true now than forever. So much effort, intention, and communication will exist for a time, then be lost as websites die, hard drives fail, etc. Spooky.
Haha. Seeing this and the MUD section brings back a huge past for me. Played 1 myself called DarkMists back in the day. Started as a teenager and played up until 6-7 years ago now. These videos are most certainly a trip down memory lane.
omg!!! so glad to see another mud/mux user in the comments, lol. i've been thinking about making a server recently just for myself. i spent YEARS in different ones based around world of darkness & even coded for one.
Loved this video so much, it's such a fun dive into a world we don't see on the modern internet trawl, but hits such a deep chord to see what it used to be like - and still is for some people. Seeing some of the sites are still up and around is so cool, and seeing defunct sites that had so much attention poured into them is fascinating! Awesome job on researching and presenting such cool sites!
I hope more of these videos are made. I didn't get into the internet until the mid-to-late 2000s but I adore old internet charm. Also Nightfall looks awesome.
I live in Idaho since 2007. It is not a real place, more like a separate reality from a dream on a different plane. Nobody ages, and retain their same bodily condition as when they "entered" regardless of how many years have passed. You also cannot leave. If you walk from one side to the other, and breach what WOULD BE the border of another state, you fall into a deep sleep and wake up where you started.
I'm glad I found your first video, and I've been playing around with Wiby. I agree with the comment at the beginning of the video, and it's amazing to be able to dig up all of these old sites. Most I've come across have been very ordinary and wholesome. Old tech sites, personal blogs, etc. One was a family's personal site, and I was directed to a page dedicated to a toddler. It occurred to me that she is probably in, or graduated from, college by now. It was a strange thought. Then I was directed to a site called Bathe In My Milk. It wasn't pornographic - just bizarre. The old internet was (is?) a strange place indeed.
Its sad theres already a whole generation that hasnt experienced the 90s internet. You really cant truly understand how much the internet has changed unless you were there. Sure you can do research and see old archived sites, but unless you were there its not the same.
@@sunriser235 it was really something. when i was maybe 10-11 I went to a summer program and they told us how to put together a website that looked like those. It was that easy that a middle schooler could do it. which is something else haha
Sometime in the mid/late 90s, my family went on vacation to stay at the beach house of a friend of my mom's. They had AOL, and I was allowed to use the internet for a half hour in the evenings. My preteen self spent a significant part of that vacation reading and then trying to explain the Evil Overlord list to my parents, brother, and my mom's friend.
That Geek house one hits really close to home. I used to be on staff for an anime convention from around 2009 - 2015 and pretty much all the staff lived together in different houses. There were 4 houses in total and they had been rented out by con staff from about 2001 until the con moved cities in 2017. I briefly lived in one of them for a year of my tenure on staff. Fond gross memories lol.
Being Gen Xer I did not really get into the internet till my late 20's to early 30s. I got my first PC in 1997 before then I had to use friends and family. I played several DOS games and spent many a night just exploring the internet and chatting to people all over the world in early crude chat rooms. It was quite fun as long as your dial up would keep connected.
Gosh I love old internet websites. I’ve been browsing the ‘net since ‘97 and not a day goes by when I don’t miss Web 1.0. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone. You’re totally right in that the old internet wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, though. I definitely remember running across tons of “anti-Pokemon” websites that were full of gore and not SFW images. Plus other websites that drew my eye because they were about video game characters I loved, but they were about putting the characters in really inappropriate scenarios. (It wasn’t like fanart, exactly-it was more just comics made by editing official art really crudely.) I didn’t understand what I was seeing most of the time, other than that it disturbed me, but it was like a train wreck and I couldn’t look away. Even so, I do still hold a lot of love for that time. The internet was a different beast, and I miss how LESS connected it was. Instead of everyone being on the same handful of social media websites, you had more people on forums and fansites, which felt more like closer-knit communities. They had their problems as well, of course, but I still miss them. I’m glad for sites like Neocities that allow for a bit of the same vibes of the old internet. I need to work on my webpage again…
Dude, there was WAY less porn on the old net. No streaming (very few movies available for download), so it was just pictures. I explored the net thoroughly in the 90s, and there was way less filth overall. Sure, there was nude pictures and stuff, but I never randomly found CP or anything of that nature. Trust me, porn is ridiculously more accessible, varied, and easy to stumble across now. Otherwise, I think your video is pretty right on. The old net was cool, but way less useful. By that, I am referring to the incredibly dense information available now on almost any topic. Want to build a synthesizer? You might be able to find a site or two on the old net, but even things like message boards were pretty sparse. Part of this was because instead of everything being Web-based, there was a variety of applications used to access everything the web had to offer. FTP was used to access files for downloading, especially warez and, yes, porn. Newsgroups were discussion groups, a lot like reddit today, where you could find people into the same stuff as you, whether it be collecting antiques, talking about punk rock, or, yknow, erotic fiction. IRC was a live chat thing, which there really isn't a popular modern equivalent today. Internet Relay Chat (specifically #sXe and #punk) was responsible for me meeting like-minded people both local to me and extremely distant friends too. Back then, and this is an important point, meeting someone from the internet in the flesh was rare, almost taboo! Its hard to explain but it was just something that wasn't an obvious thing to do. Another factor was that having a digitized image of yourself was not, by any means, a given. So it was fairly rare to know what people looked like unless they were able to track down a scanner and keep a picture of themselves online. So it was a lot of imagining how hot this or that person was, etc. :) I was a teenager. There was other apps, like gopher, telnet, etc. I played quite a few MUDs back in the day. BBS's were another way to connect with people and have fun with a computer, but that's kind of a different story. Finally, it was quite a bit of effort to find a reliable and trustworthy internet provider, especially closer to the mid-1990s. It was a cottage industry, with many many small players and few large ones. It would cost around $15-20 a month for dial-up internet. Colleges were one of the few ways one could get anywhere near the speeds we take for granted today. I used a 2400baud, and then a 14.4k modem for many many years before the web became more ubiquitous and, finally, cable became avaialble and accessible. I loved the internet for all the free software, information about music I liked, and because I suffered from social anxiety and felt like an outsider where I lived, the opportunity to connect with people I could click with. I could express myself freely without fear. Thanks for your video and I don't mean to be overly critical of it. Hope you don't mind me writing all this. Brings back many fond memories. And a few memories of creepers being weird to me on IRC. :)
Oh no I don’t mind at all! Thank you so much for all this information you provided, It’s super useful and I appreciate it greatly. I’ve been trying to strike the right balance after the first part because even though these videos are incredibly nostalgic by their very nature, I wanna be accurate with things rather than being totally biased, because to me it’s always one of two camps. We got comments from, (for lack of a better term) boomers discussing how every single thing ever was absolutely 100% better back then, and we also got comments from younger people regarding it being pointless to look back to a primitive past like this, both camps bothering me especially since neither takeaways were something I intended people to come away with, though I know technically I can’t control that. In the simplest of terms what I’m trying to say is I appreciate any information like this being stated because it definitely helps get a much better sense of that unbiased balance I was attempting to go for this time. This specific point isn’t probably going to get a lengthy focus in another video in the future, but in general even though the old internet had such an incredibly fascinating allure with so many redeeming qualities, I just didn’t want these videos to give the entirely wrong idea as to what we were trying to do. Once again thank you for your comment!
@@danielutriabrooks477 IRC is still a thing, you can go and try to use it. Essentially it's a communication protocol that allows people to join networks that host a variety of channels where people can talk. I feel really bad making that comparison, but think of Discord text channels but without the ability to send embedded images, videos etc. Just text. It's as simple as that.
With 56k modems being the standard, porn vids simply didn't exist in an actually usable sense. Pictures for sure but with how much more vulnerable users were to viruses on the 90s it really wasn't worth it.
I like this series but I'd honestly prefer if it was more about old webpages instead of Neocities trying to ape the style. If you want an alternative venue of exploration you could look into oocities archival project
I started up on mailing lists too! Funny enough a Sailor Moon one. I was 16 at the time and we had a whole roleplaying group. The list died but we had moved on to a 'guest book ' until that eventually died out.
Same! Alt.fan.dune was mine. I got to "meet" the guy who wrote the Dune Encyclopedia there, which was awesome. Also, hung out on a lot of sites and message boards run by geeky celebrities like Douglas Adams and Wil Wheaton.
Being born in 2004, I never got to experience the "old internet", but from watching countless videos and from reading nostalgic comments, I do wish I was there for it (I know this doesn't nearly portray the true feeling of the old internet though). Sure, the chances of you stumbling across something heinous back in the day was much higher than it is now, but the old internet just felt warm and inviting, It was a new medium for people to easily connect from all around the world. On the other hand, the internet today is so widespread that it is no longer special, but rather, a lifestyle. Websites now all have the same, corporate design and are littered with advertisements. Everything now is about making a quick buck, rather than making a new friend or sharing your interests with others who may also share the same interests.
A long, long time ago in the 90s, you could look something up and be just as likely to get a fan site as a corporate site. If you looked up a movie you like, it would be tons of personal fan sites and it would take time to find the official corporate site.
@15:21 If not for certain blockers, loading times can still be abysmal. Just now, pages are trying to load 13,000 ads on their page to pull in that ad money.
And MUDs bring me back! That was basically my beginning college years. Was a mod on a couple and took on one for a small period of time. Would fire up ZMud and just get so involved in the world, the other players, etc.
The nostalgia these vidyaz incite is truly something man lol. Alien ground wallpaper used to be popular when I was in college 😂😂😂 So crazy how much things have changed. Oh and yes, if you logged on back then you were sure to see some prawn lmaoooo
I'm not that old as I was born in 2006, so I wasn't really there during the era of the old internet. But there's this website made in 2000 which is about a sci-fi worldbuilding project. It's called Orion's Arm and it's about a world where multiple AIs evolve to the point they become gods. Some help out humanity, others just go and do their own things independent from humans. It's a hard sci-fi project, so most of it is somewhat based on real scientific principles backed up with math. Things do get pretty exaggerated and hard to understand tho. Despite its age, it's still being updated somewhat regularly, it's last update being 5 days ago
When I watched your first video, the first thing I thought of was Santa Cruz geekhouse websites - something I found fascinating and aspirational as a teenager. I remember the Abattoir in particular and wow their site did not look like that at the time!
Another great vid. Not sure i agree about there being more dangerous content on the old web. I used the web back in the 90's, and i don't remember ever seeing anything shocking or disturbing. I've seen more upsetting stuff on the internet in the passed week than i did back in the day.
I remember back in the day most products and companies had a full webpage with fun stuff to do. Sites like McDonald's, Disney, south park, and even movies had downloadable trailes, wallpapers, and many offered fun games
The lifeguard rescue spot the drowning child was part of an actual red cross lifeguard certification course. I took that course and remember this video being on DVD ( It might have been VHS but I'm pretty sure it was DVD era just as netflix was starting to add streaming).
I had to watch videos like this in my gym class in high school too we had a big week long water safety class and this was part of it. Still such a creepy name for a website and theres no links or buttons just a youtube video of a child drowning so it caught me so off guard while jumping around
After I saw the first video I dug out my old dell demension 4300s and after some fiddling got it to work and booted up wiby I have explored wiby for hours with a friend it has been quite the journey thank you for showing me how to explore the world I missed. my computer recently broke
@ 3:15 I actually remember the concept of a Geekhouse from when I was a kid, though I can't remember where or when exactly I heard of it (I'd never seen this site; just know of the idea). @ 4:35 Remember when people could just casually get a place, in California, no less? Anyway: here's one that I remember from c. 1999-2000: there was this website that was basically a fan page (for lack of a better description) for Mr. T, which pits him against all manner of fantastical scenarios. The one that really stuck out to me was Mr. T vs. the T-rex, but there were all manner of other scenarios. I don't know how well they'd age now, but to be honest, I loved every minute of Mr. T defeating all comers: it was super epic! nine year old me thought it was the best thing since sliced bread :D There were all these dinosaur sites too that I'd go too. Sadly, most were gone by c. 2010. You sometimes find images of them in the wayback machine. My favorite was the JPinstitute, because it had the most complete illustrated catalogue of dinosaurs (~300 or so last I checked). The illustrations in JP by today's standards are horribly outdated and way gaudy, but it was still cool to learn about all these dinosarus (the site went down when I was 16--not long before I came to the US). There was also this one website that talked about the history of dinosaru studies. I don't remember its name anymore, but at one point I'd saved all the pages from it on a bunch of floppies (which gives you an idea of how long ago it was). The website was memorable because it talked about the bone wars, and the illustration of a T-rex it had give the head a distinct copper-color. there was another one that had more taxa, but didn't always include the illustrations, though scientifically they were more useful: EDIT: Dinodata! That was its name. It was run by a guy named Fred Bervoets. Sadly, the domain is now used for a dentistry business. I think the rise of Wikipedia basically led to them being out-competed, and in many ways wikis are easier to use. But there was a unique charm to a lot of these old websites, that I find sorely lacking in modern equivalents. The one thing I've long sought though was something from when I was 8 or 9: this dinosaur game you could play online, where you started in a maze and had to dodge a raptor. I still remember the creepy sound track vividly. Never got past the first level (slow internet + 1/2 hour limit + me being 8), but the game's stuck with me since.
We got internet at our school when I was a senior in high school. It took 30 minutes to load a website, so the teacher would teach until then, and then a few of us at a time could go look at the website
When i first logged on to the internet in the late 90's, i predominantly used it for Pokemon and Megaman Sprites. Not to mention Newgrounds, which was my daily haunt.
hey debunk file since you showed the Worst Of The Wweb logo (circa 1996 or so) in the vid you may as well make a vid on them and how slam dunking on websites has evolved. (14:03)
My oldest memory of wild internet isn't anything compared to the death stuff you see now but it was a woman in a night gown hands tied behind her in a chair. A guy looks at her as she cried and shot her in the forehead. It was so gross and wild to see back then. Probably 1997.
My friends and I made personal websites back in the day, before search engines were really a thing. I had a collection of some very basic "window sitter" shimejis I made (goth anime angels were all the rage back then). My one friend had a gallery for the wrestling events he attended, another was using hers as a journal, while another was using his to try and promote his self-published book (which wouldn't actually be finished for at least another eight years). One friend had a collection of really bad knock-knock jokes, with a "hidden" page dedicated to P⭐ Actresses he liked. The internet back then was wild, but also felt a lot emptier than it does now. If you didn't know the address of a website, it may as well not even exist.
Don't forget the rampant viruses on the old net. I was *appalled* that my workplace proudly declared their goal was a 10% fail rate on simulated phishing attacks with the world's sketchiest links. Then I realized that I was forged in the fires of the late 90s and early 00s internet and to this day mouse over every single link to check where it goes before clicking it. Also, I think I've actually been to the evil overlord website. I remember the "cellblock" links, and I know I've encountered the list itself, but I can't remember if it was that exact page. I don't remember it being a black background.
My girlfriend has a Samsung Galaxy A01, I often jokingly call it her "cavephone" and I told a joke that while exploring a nearby city I found an old cave with rock paintings in it of people using Samsung Galaxy A01's. The reason I bring this up is because before the earliest version of Google Android used to resemble old desktop computers and her "Cavephone" looks a lot like a Microsoft Windows 7 device. But before that we used to have Microsoft Windows Mobile, we used to have phones that looked like Microsoft Windows XP and people probably browsed these old websites on smartphones that looked like the desktops of the era. Maybe it would be a cool idea to explore the internet using such an old mobile device.
I was a lifeguard for ten years, and I swear I’ve seen that pool video. I bet it was one of the videos used in training/certification, I think it may even still be used depending on the certification. I’ve had both RedCross and StarGuard training, so for sure one of them used it
It seemed very familiar to me as well. Granted I’ve seen plenty of videos covering this sort of stuff and was never a life guard but I did take a bunch of swim safety classes in highschool through my gym class so thats possibly where I remember it from. Its a really useful website for training its just got a scary name!
Unfortunately I didn't live in a Nerd House, but always wanted to. Closest I got was the BBS we raised in college, and reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland in the 90s.
the idaho one made me laugh because i’m not even from the us, but when i was like 13 my aunt took in an exchange student - from idaho. so now i am 100% convinced that a) idaho does exist but b) it’s just farms. nothing else.
I miss 2leep. Anyone know similar websites? That was when internet was at its peak right before things went down. The golden age of TH-cam was great. Back then, the internet had a mysterious touch to it. Ghost vids, conspiracies, rare unknown hidden lore. The internet left you wanting coming back for more. Now, there’s no mystery to it.
I think my favorite part of the old Internet was AOL chat rooms. I still have friends I keep in touch with regularly.. I can't remember the name of the site, but there was a place where you could play flash games and get news.. I probably spent hours on the site and now I'm drawing a blank.
I remeber I found of random or too because I was interested in Japanese fashion on the French Gyaru blog. I didn't understand anything, but I always looked for updates because they always showed scans of Gyaru magazines. It was just a pure fans-for-fans thingy on the internet that I miss, especially back then when you liked something that was not popular, like anime or Japanese fashion.
I'd love to watch you revisit a 2D clicking RPG game called "Synthetic Reality: Well of Souls". It was basically created by two guys in their homes and for 1996 it's seriously in depth for a game to be created by only two guys.
It'd be really cool if there was a social media platform that specifically focused on recreating the old internet and the randomness of it, with anybody being able to create their own web 1.0-style website and add what they want to it. Similar to Wiby, you'd be able to be sent to a random site, or you could search up whatever topic you want to find. There'd be no likes or dislikes, but people would be able to upvote websites to show up higher on a search topic (though thinking about it this could easily be overrun by bots, so maybe not). It'd be so cool if something like this was a thing tho.
@@DebunkFile Oh yeah! Forgot about that lol I actually haven't really looked at Neocities much before this and it's really awesome. Thanks for telling me about it!
something about the wobble town page caught my eye; at 8:03 bill wurtz' website is linked as 'archive of my videos' which strikes me as really strange, because i can't find any other relation between wobbletown and bill wurtz. i think wobbletown is a fairly recent site, assuming that the wobbles age is displayed in days. the oldest ones are aged at around 700, meaning they were something over 2 years old. some of the sites it links to were made in 2022, which matches the 2 year mark. seems like a niche little friend project! still puzzled by what bill wurtz has to do with it tho
I grew up on the old internet, and I can't relate to your desire to graft the safety of the modern internet onto the 'soul' of the old internet. It's an impossible combo. The safety imposed on corporate platforms is what has given us the sanitized and bland internet of today. Yes, the old internet was dirty. Some of the smut even became legends in their own right ala 2 girls one cup, lemon party and blue waffles. But there was a strange charm in uncovering those disgusting things just as you found charm in the more innocuous websites showcased in this video. I miss the old internet warts and all.
But with that smut came real creative freedom and communities. The "Wild West" days were just better. Imagine what we could do with THAT freedom and our current technical abilities
Yeah, it's a very weak-minded mentality. I guess you could argue that some of these things may have been legitimately harmful to kids, but I think the things on the modern internet are just as much, if not far worse for kids. Nowadays, everything on the internet is designed by teams of corporate psychologists to be as mind-numbing and addictive as possible, particularly to children who lack psychological defenses. And you can still find all the bad stuff, plenty of it.
@@thenew4559There’s certainly not another BestGore or LiveLeak out there, shock sites solely are a thing of the past. The closest we had to it since was those propaganda videos from ISIS, what you’re thinking of is elsagate brainrot
i think they showed us spot the drowning child when i was in school. idk, i have a very vague memory of it and it seems like something they’d show in school as like a psa, especially since it doesn’t end in tragedy
one of these old websites uses a ton of Nintendo / Konami music that used to be okay to use online in the times before TH-cam. I'm not going to ruin the surprise, that's up to you, tuber
Pretty sure the Evil Overlord one started as a .txt file, that we'd pass along to each other via pre-internet BBSs and email. At any rate, the content of that site is what today you'd call a meme. It got around.
You mentioned the old internet was slower, but honestly, not much has changed there given the bloat on many sites today. I'd much rather load a news site over 56kbps that is simple text and maybe 3 low-res images, has no video ads popping up over the text, than today at broadband where a corp has tried to make the experience as grabby and frustrating as possible and the tab is taking up 2GB of memory to force 8 popups asking for my email address and cookie preferences, with moving ads every two paragraphs. There's nothing stopping us from having that old web back. We've got the Wiby search engine (thank you so much for letting us all know about it!) so we can just get crackin making suits that'll appear on it. The illusion is that there's no point in making a sure that only 1000 people will see. But there is, and back then, 1000 views was a lot! We just have to reset our expectations of "success" and we can all have our own web again.
My last quarter at grad school may have saved my life with this course encouraging and showing us how to build html sites and RSS feeds and alternate web browser setups and all these other tools that give the control back to the user and we wrote weekly responses about how the shift away from personalization might correspond with other losses of freedom. I can't go back after that, tell everyone I'm camping out on the REAL internet until all this nonsense with bots/sheeple who make themselves like bots blows over
Not actually internet related but anyone remember Zoombinis??? It was this educational computer game that came out in 98. When I was 4th grade we'd go to the computer lab as a class where they had the really old apple computers, I don't even know if they were imacs but they were the original apple desktops that looked like mini old tv's all bulky and round. Anyway, they only thing we were allowed to do in the computer lab was play Zoombinis. Anyone?? Any millennials here?? Computers used to be so weird and strange. I can't believe I was there in the early years of it all. I was just a kid yes, but still I have pretty vivid memories.
i recently got inspired by one content creator i like to create small personal site for no one but myself, just as an hobby, this is much more expressive and fun than any kind of social media we have now, doing it out of passion and not internet points numbers going up, this is something modern web is missing, nowadays it's really hard to find personal sites as search engines are showing you what they want you to see and now what you want to see.
I really know what you are trying to describe. I was born in 1989 and one of the coolest things growing up was when the internet & computers got to the point where you could find extremely unique websites that just seemed to be passion projects made by someone creative and with talent. It was even more impressive at that time because it was actually pretty rare for someone to have the skill and knowledge of how to create something like that. Some sites had very creative art, or moving interactive things that you could influence how it moved by moving your mouse pointer over the region of the screen. I wish I could remember this one site I used to visit all the time around the early 2000's. I think it was around when "the digital blasphemy" was around or slightly before it. Idk if it was a Shockwave kinda site or something but The site would let you click thru a bunch of different abstract interactive art objects such as a school of fish or a bunch of Sperm looking things that if you move your mouse over it, it actually had pretty well made movement feedback controls. There was a bunch of other options that were interactive but they didn't stick in my memory so well. Besides this site, there was so many other obscure things that I sadly didn't log into my memory in a solid way.
Now i kinda want to do this too, sounds a really cool thing to put your time into.
@@LivinLuxuriously
Get rid of the last three words and you're pretty much on point.
@@benmcreynolds8581 85 here. I remember PAYING to upload videos to geocities on DIAL UP. I was an OG beta tester for TH-cam in 2005! Yet they terminated my fan account after 15 years without any rationale given.
cj?
As somebody who grew up in the 1990's and 2000's in a small farm town, I didn't get into the old web as much as others, but from when I did get on via middle school computer class, it was special. I knew it would eventually explode, but not quite to this extent.
I miss web rings and those big top 100 sites and each had some wacky banner ads for each site. Where you just stumble down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
1999-2011 Flash games, passion projects, random rabbit holes, myspace, newgrounds, personalization, TH-cam.
2012-2024: Mindless scrolling
So trueeeee...
Just found Snood on an old HDD
I love using the internet for passion projects. 🥰 Lately I've been liking the idea of starting a blog about the miniatures wargame I've been playing.
even back in 2012 there were really cool rabbit holes and personalization on like Tumblr
"and... Goku?" *Shows Vegeta*
Debunk, you're breaking my heart
It was funny at least
It would be funnier if he showed up grown up Goten
I'm going to believe it was intentional to get us to comment for engagement.
Pleeeeeease be on purpose hahaha
He wasn't entirely wrong. Goku was on the page, just not who he thought he was
wasnt that zelda?
I was 12 when we first got an internet connection in 1998. I feel so much nostalgia and have really good memories of the years that followed. It really was like a different world back then, compared to how sterile and corporatized much of the online experience is today. It's hard to really explain in words but it was a special time to be online. Im glad that efforts have been made to try and preserve the old internet as it was. Also, it's great that we have content creators, like Debunk and others, who explore some of those old sites and try to bring a little of that experience to those ppl who didn't get to witness it all firsthand. Thank you for this!
I'm old, I've been online for many years. 97-2010 was peak internet. Since 2010 the Internet has taken a nose dive. It's really sad. You use to be able to lose hours and hours just check out cool new stuff and dig into crazy rabbit holes. Now it's youtube, Instagram, facebook, Twitter, then back to youtube on over again. The Internet use to be mind simulating now it mind melting. It's the dumbing down of everything for the sole purpose of dumbing down society.
Boomer nostalgia😂
Sounds like a personal problem.
Highly doubt you've explores the whole of the internet - you're just to lazy to find something that interests you now.
I really know what you are trying to say. I was born in 1989 and one of the coolest things growing up was when the internet & computers got to the point where you could find extremely unique websites that just seemed to be passion projects made by someone creative and with talent. It was even more impressive at that time because it was actually pretty rare for someone to have the skill and knowledge of how to create something like that. Some sites had very creative art, or moving interactive things that you could influence how it moved by moving your mouse pointer over the region of the screen. I wish I could remember this one site I used to visit all the time around the early 2000's. I think it was around when "the digital blasphemy" was around or slightly before it. Idk if it was a Shockwave kinda site or something but The site would let you click thru a bunch of different abstract interactive art objects such as a school of fish or a bunch of Sperm looking things that if you move your mouse over it, it actually had pretty well made movement feedback controls. There was a bunch of other options that were interactive but they didn't stick in my memory so well. Besides this site, there was so many other obscure things that I sadly didn't log into my memory in a solid way. It really would be nice if we could see more of a blend of both worlds nowadays. Taking the best aspects of each time. I don't understand why so many things have fazed out nowadays into this bland, soulless, minimalistic approach to a lot of things in modern society..
YT & Odysee are probably the only sites I would miss if I was suddenly back on IRC in '01 or so...
Also I'm happy not having to wait an hour for a .rm file or downloading 128kbs mp3 over some strangers ftp. (But I appreciated the .rm video or the 128kbs mp3 more for it.)
Still have quite a few .rm videos but had to load up an old WinXP VM to get most to work
When I was a little kid, I actually used the internet to find folks to be pen pals with... Via snail mail. :) I'm 39 and still have that stack of letters from all over the world.
😊
You can still do that today, you can meet new people and exchange letters today. It's just less efficient, but more durable than instant messaging.
Hell yeah I love this stuff man the early internet was a wild place but there’s something so cozy about it also. It was very creative due to restrictions
The subtle risk of seeing something cursed arguably enhanced the excitement. Yeah, you might find something you'll wish you never saw, but odds are pretty good you'll mostly forget it and discover something awesome that you spend the next few days poring over. I recall an old HTML-based mine cart game that I stumbled across exactly once in my life that scared me. Now, I wonder what it was and if I ever saw it at all. Shout outs to Internet "phone books" that existed during the turn of the millennium for the lists of random websites in paperback book format.
Anyone remembers Bert is evil? Him photobombing Bin Laden broke me 🤣
I remember when they had the whole Sesame Street gang holding contraband, glocks n murder knives
@@damian9303 YES that was hilarious. Finding random stuff like that online is what made the old internet so much fun. So full of weirdness.
A kind of creativity that I guess we all miss, as commenters on this video.
Reminding of some very nostalgic times. ❤ Great start to the weekend TYSM!
wonderful always 1 step ahead, i'm 34 didn't use the internet until i was 14-ish. I was rather poor as a kid but i remember parts of the old internet that still lingered and some of these are rather nostalgic
from Scotland with love
I always loved the dial-up noise so soothing
Nostalgic sure. Soothing? Like nails on a chalkboard 😂
No joke it's my dad's ringtone, mostly because he's half deaf
Being in college for software development this content is gold. The internet is so damn huge
Finally, I came across with your channel again. All I remember from your channel is that iconic intro music, and now, I need to keep the name of your channel on my mind because of this quality uploads from you!
Glad to have you back!
You can always just. You know. Subscribe.
I got a hit of nostalgia of that. Nerd houses... i immediately remembered my worry-free days of youth in early 2000s internet
1:35
I've been using the internet since 1996. Realizing there is a generation's worth of people who never experienced the old net is eye-opening to me. The thing is, there are people who have been using it before I was even born in 1984. Bulletin Board Systems and Usergroups were a subculture onto themselves from the late 70s through the early 90s.
Newsgroups! It is fascinating to think about. So many memories, whole lives and friendships, etc., took place in this digital domain and are long gone and forgotten. Obviously, that's more true now than forever. So much effort, intention, and communication will exist for a time, then be lost as websites die, hard drives fail, etc. Spooky.
Haha. Seeing this and the MUD section brings back a huge past for me. Played 1 myself called DarkMists back in the day. Started as a teenager and played up until 6-7 years ago now.
These videos are most certainly a trip down memory lane.
omg!!! so glad to see another mud/mux user in the comments, lol. i've been thinking about making a server recently just for myself. i spent YEARS in different ones based around world of darkness & even coded for one.
ah discovering the hour of slack and the church of the subgenius website in the late 90s was a special kind of heaven
Yep, right there with you! Praise Bob.
How does this not have more views? This is incredible
Loved this video so much, it's such a fun dive into a world we don't see on the modern internet trawl, but hits such a deep chord to see what it used to be like - and still is for some people. Seeing some of the sites are still up and around is so cool, and seeing defunct sites that had so much attention poured into them is fascinating! Awesome job on researching and presenting such cool sites!
I hope more of these videos are made. I didn't get into the internet until the mid-to-late 2000s but I adore old internet charm.
Also Nightfall looks awesome.
fr, almost made me want to visit it and play it
I live in Idaho since 2007. It is not a real place, more like a separate reality from a dream on a different plane. Nobody ages, and retain their same bodily condition as when they "entered" regardless of how many years have passed. You also cannot leave. If you walk from one side to the other, and breach what WOULD BE the border of another state, you fall into a deep sleep and wake up where you started.
I'm glad I found your first video, and I've been playing around with Wiby. I agree with the comment at the beginning of the video, and it's amazing to be able to dig up all of these old sites.
Most I've come across have been very ordinary and wholesome. Old tech sites, personal blogs, etc. One was a family's personal site, and I was directed to a page dedicated to a toddler. It occurred to me that she is probably in, or graduated from, college by now. It was a strange thought.
Then I was directed to a site called Bathe In My Milk. It wasn't pornographic - just bizarre. The old internet was (is?) a strange place indeed.
I bookmarked Wiby so fast. It's addictive to just randomise a new old web rabbithole to fall down.
Debunk File never disappoints!!
Awesome vid, as always! Love the section on Nightfall!!!
Thank you! That site really was cool
Its sad theres already a whole generation that hasnt experienced the 90s internet. You really cant truly understand how much the internet has changed unless you were there. Sure you can do research and see old archived sites, but unless you were there its not the same.
I really wish I could’ve. It seems more colorful compared to the bleak, modern look of today’s internet.
@@sunriser235 it was really something. when i was maybe 10-11 I went to a summer program and they told us how to put together a website that looked like those. It was that easy that a middle schooler could do it. which is something else haha
Sometime in the mid/late 90s, my family went on vacation to stay at the beach house of a friend of my mom's. They had AOL, and I was allowed to use the internet for a half hour in the evenings. My preteen self spent a significant part of that vacation reading and then trying to explain the Evil Overlord list to my parents, brother, and my mom's friend.
That Geek house one hits really close to home. I used to be on staff for an anime convention from around 2009 - 2015 and pretty much all the staff lived together in different houses. There were 4 houses in total and they had been rented out by con staff from about 2001 until the con moved cities in 2017. I briefly lived in one of them for a year of my tenure on staff. Fond gross memories lol.
Phenomenal work! I truly have a newfound inspiration about the internet and I thank you!
Being Gen Xer I did not really get into the internet till my late 20's to early 30s. I got my first PC in 1997 before then I had to use friends and family. I played several DOS games and spent many a night just exploring the internet and chatting to people all over the world in early crude chat rooms. It was quite fun as long as your dial up would keep connected.
I’m happy to see two newer posts!
I love the sounds and background music
Gosh I love old internet websites. I’ve been browsing the ‘net since ‘97 and not a day goes by when I don’t miss Web 1.0. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone.
You’re totally right in that the old internet wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, though. I definitely remember running across tons of “anti-Pokemon” websites that were full of gore and not SFW images. Plus other websites that drew my eye because they were about video game characters I loved, but they were about putting the characters in really inappropriate scenarios. (It wasn’t like fanart, exactly-it was more just comics made by editing official art really crudely.) I didn’t understand what I was seeing most of the time, other than that it disturbed me, but it was like a train wreck and I couldn’t look away.
Even so, I do still hold a lot of love for that time. The internet was a different beast, and I miss how LESS connected it was. Instead of everyone being on the same handful of social media websites, you had more people on forums and fansites, which felt more like closer-knit communities. They had their problems as well, of course, but I still miss them.
I’m glad for sites like Neocities that allow for a bit of the same vibes of the old internet. I need to work on my webpage again…
Dude, there was WAY less porn on the old net. No streaming (very few movies available for download), so it was just pictures. I explored the net thoroughly in the 90s, and there was way less filth overall. Sure, there was nude pictures and stuff, but I never randomly found CP or anything of that nature. Trust me, porn is ridiculously more accessible, varied, and easy to stumble across now. Otherwise, I think your video is pretty right on. The old net was cool, but way less useful. By that, I am referring to the incredibly dense information available now on almost any topic. Want to build a synthesizer? You might be able to find a site or two on the old net, but even things like message boards were pretty sparse.
Part of this was because instead of everything being Web-based, there was a variety of applications used to access everything the web had to offer. FTP was used to access files for downloading, especially warez and, yes, porn. Newsgroups were discussion groups, a lot like reddit today, where you could find people into the same stuff as you, whether it be collecting antiques, talking about punk rock, or, yknow, erotic fiction. IRC was a live chat thing, which there really isn't a popular modern equivalent today. Internet Relay Chat (specifically #sXe and #punk) was responsible for me meeting like-minded people both local to me and extremely distant friends too.
Back then, and this is an important point, meeting someone from the internet in the flesh was rare, almost taboo! Its hard to explain but it was just something that wasn't an obvious thing to do. Another factor was that having a digitized image of yourself was not, by any means, a given. So it was fairly rare to know what people looked like unless they were able to track down a scanner and keep a picture of themselves online. So it was a lot of imagining how hot this or that person was, etc. :) I was a teenager. There was other apps, like gopher, telnet, etc. I played quite a few MUDs back in the day. BBS's were another way to connect with people and have fun with a computer, but that's kind of a different story.
Finally, it was quite a bit of effort to find a reliable and trustworthy internet provider, especially closer to the mid-1990s. It was a cottage industry, with many many small players and few large ones. It would cost around $15-20 a month for dial-up internet. Colleges were one of the few ways one could get anywhere near the speeds we take for granted today. I used a 2400baud, and then a 14.4k modem for many many years before the web became more ubiquitous and, finally, cable became avaialble and accessible. I loved the internet for all the free software, information about music I liked, and because I suffered from social anxiety and felt like an outsider where I lived, the opportunity to connect with people I could click with. I could express myself freely without fear.
Thanks for your video and I don't mean to be overly critical of it. Hope you don't mind me writing all this. Brings back many fond memories. And a few memories of creepers being weird to me on IRC. :)
Oh no I don’t mind at all! Thank you so much for all this information you provided, It’s super useful and I appreciate it greatly.
I’ve been trying to strike the right balance after the first part because even though these videos are incredibly nostalgic by their very nature, I wanna be accurate with things rather than being totally biased, because to me it’s always one of two camps. We got comments from, (for lack of a better term) boomers discussing how every single thing ever was absolutely 100% better back then, and we also got comments from younger people regarding it being pointless to look back to a primitive past like this, both camps bothering me especially since neither takeaways were something I intended people to come away with, though I know technically I can’t control that.
In the simplest of terms what I’m trying to say is I appreciate any information like this being stated because it definitely helps get a much better sense of that unbiased balance I was attempting to go for this time. This specific point isn’t probably going to get a lengthy focus in another video in the future, but in general even though the old internet had such an incredibly fascinating allure with so many redeeming qualities, I just didn’t want these videos to give the entirely wrong idea as to what we were trying to do. Once again thank you for your comment!
I always hear about IRCs, but I still don't understand them. Could you tell me how did they work and how was the general experience there?
@@danielutriabrooks477 IRC is still a thing, you can go and try to use it. Essentially it's a communication protocol that allows people to join networks that host a variety of channels where people can talk. I feel really bad making that comparison, but think of Discord text channels but without the ability to send embedded images, videos etc. Just text. It's as simple as that.
You had to go out of your way to find it, and even then, back then it was behind paywalls that were virus filled and very likely scams.
With 56k modems being the standard, porn vids simply didn't exist in an actually usable sense.
Pictures for sure but with how much more vulnerable users were to viruses on the 90s it really wasn't worth it.
I like this series but I'd honestly prefer if it was more about old webpages instead of Neocities trying to ape the style.
If you want an alternative venue of exploration you could look into oocities archival project
I started up on mailing lists too! Funny enough a Sailor Moon one. I was 16 at the time and we had a whole roleplaying group. The list died but we had moved on to a 'guest book ' until that eventually died out.
Same! Alt.fan.dune was mine. I got to "meet" the guy who wrote the Dune Encyclopedia there, which was awesome. Also, hung out on a lot of sites and message boards run by geeky celebrities like Douglas Adams and Wil Wheaton.
Being born in 2004, I never got to experience the "old internet", but from watching countless videos and from reading nostalgic comments, I do wish I was there for it (I know this doesn't nearly portray the true feeling of the old internet though).
Sure, the chances of you stumbling across something heinous back in the day was much higher than it is now, but the old internet just felt warm and inviting, It was a new medium for people to easily connect from all around the world. On the other hand, the internet today is so widespread that it is no longer special, but rather, a lifestyle. Websites now all have the same, corporate design and are littered with advertisements. Everything now is about making a quick buck, rather than making a new friend or sharing your interests with others who may also share the same interests.
Ayy! A debunk file vid to start the morning.
I cant wait for the geocities episode! We had to build them for our middle school computer class 😂😂 the old internet was truly a unique time
Yeah, lots of fun in the good ole days...🤘🏼💯✔️
A long, long time ago in the 90s, you could look something up and be just as likely to get a fan site as a corporate site. If you looked up a movie you like, it would be tons of personal fan sites and it would take time to find the official corporate site.
It’s always a good day when we get an upload
@15:21 If not for certain blockers, loading times can still be abysmal. Just now, pages are trying to load 13,000 ads on their page to pull in that ad money.
Oh man, MUDs bring big nostalgic blasts from the past. Gives me the fuzzywuzzies to know there are still some out there.
And MUDs bring me back! That was basically my beginning college years. Was a mod on a couple and took on one for a small period of time. Would fire up ZMud and just get so involved in the world, the other players, etc.
The nostalgia these vidyaz incite is truly something man lol. Alien ground wallpaper used to be popular when I was in college 😂😂😂 So crazy how much things have changed. Oh and yes, if you logged on back then you were sure to see some prawn lmaoooo
I'm not that old as I was born in 2006, so I wasn't really there during the era of the old internet. But there's this website made in 2000 which is about a sci-fi worldbuilding project. It's called Orion's Arm and it's about a world where multiple AIs evolve to the point they become gods. Some help out humanity, others just go and do their own things independent from humans. It's a hard sci-fi project, so most of it is somewhat based on real scientific principles backed up with math. Things do get pretty exaggerated and hard to understand tho. Despite its age, it's still being updated somewhat regularly, it's last update being 5 days ago
That indeed sounds interesting
When I watched your first video, the first thing I thought of was Santa Cruz geekhouse websites - something I found fascinating and aspirational as a teenager. I remember the Abattoir in particular and wow their site did not look like that at the time!
Another great vid.
Not sure i agree about there being more dangerous content on the old web. I used the web back in the 90's, and i don't remember ever seeing anything shocking or disturbing. I've seen more upsetting stuff on the internet in the passed week than i did back in the day.
Really good final words talking about a bit on the nuance of "The Good Old Times"
The old internet was sooooo much better! Brings back sooo much memories 😢
I remember back in the day most products and companies had a full webpage with fun stuff to do. Sites like McDonald's, Disney, south park, and even movies had downloadable trailes, wallpapers, and many offered fun games
The lifeguard rescue spot the drowning child was part of an actual red cross lifeguard certification course. I took that course and remember this video being on DVD ( It might have been VHS but I'm pretty sure it was DVD era just as netflix was starting to add streaming).
I had to watch videos like this in my gym class in high school too we had a big week long water safety class and this was part of it. Still such a creepy name for a website and theres no links or buttons just a youtube video of a child drowning so it caught me so off guard while jumping around
After I saw the first video I dug out my old dell demension 4300s and after some fiddling got it to work and booted up wiby I have explored wiby for hours with a friend it has been quite the journey thank you for showing me how to explore the world I missed. my computer recently broke
@ 3:15
I actually remember the concept of a Geekhouse from when I was a kid, though I can't remember where or when exactly I heard of it (I'd never seen this site; just know of the idea).
@ 4:35
Remember when people could just casually get a place, in California, no less?
Anyway: here's one that I remember from c. 1999-2000: there was this website that was basically a fan page (for lack of a better description) for Mr. T, which pits him against all manner of fantastical scenarios. The one that really stuck out to me was Mr. T vs. the T-rex, but there were all manner of other scenarios. I don't know how well they'd age now, but to be honest, I loved every minute of Mr. T defeating all comers: it was super epic! nine year old me thought it was the best thing since sliced bread :D
There were all these dinosaur sites too that I'd go too. Sadly, most were gone by c. 2010. You sometimes find images of them in the wayback machine. My favorite was the JPinstitute, because it had the most complete illustrated catalogue of dinosaurs (~300 or so last I checked). The illustrations in JP by today's standards are horribly outdated and way gaudy, but it was still cool to learn about all these dinosarus (the site went down when I was 16--not long before I came to the US). There was also this one website that talked about the history of dinosaru studies. I don't remember its name anymore, but at one point I'd saved all the pages from it on a bunch of floppies (which gives you an idea of how long ago it was). The website was memorable because it talked about the bone wars, and the illustration of a T-rex it had give the head a distinct copper-color. there was another one that had more taxa, but didn't always include the illustrations, though scientifically they were more useful: EDIT: Dinodata! That was its name. It was run by a guy named Fred Bervoets. Sadly, the domain is now used for a dentistry business.
I think the rise of Wikipedia basically led to them being out-competed, and in many ways wikis are easier to use. But there was a unique charm to a lot of these old websites, that I find sorely lacking in modern equivalents.
The one thing I've long sought though was something from when I was 8 or 9: this dinosaur game you could play online, where you started in a maze and had to dodge a raptor. I still remember the creepy sound track vividly. Never got past the first level (slow internet + 1/2 hour limit + me being 8), but the game's stuck with me since.
I started making my own web 1.0 website. It's proving very fun. I love how I can make it so simple but just the way I like.
We got internet at our school when I was a senior in high school. It took 30 minutes to load a website, so the teacher would teach until then, and then a few of us at a time could go look at the website
When i first logged on to the internet in the late 90's, i predominantly used it for Pokemon and Megaman Sprites. Not to mention Newgrounds, which was my daily haunt.
hey debunk file since you showed the Worst Of The Wweb logo (circa 1996 or so) in the vid you may as well make a vid on them and how slam dunking on websites has evolved. (14:03)
best notif I could've seen today woohoo
Nightfall is so cute and traditional. That game looks fun. I will surely have to try it out. It seems so fun.
Just wait until you telnet to the blinkenlights server to watch starwars created entirely out of text
I literally did that after searching for Windows XP Tips and Tricks back in 2008
wow i forgot about this one
My oldest memory of wild internet isn't anything compared to the death stuff you see now but it was a woman in a night gown hands tied behind her in a chair. A guy looks at her as she cried and shot her in the forehead. It was so gross and wild to see back then. Probably 1997.
Fake video by the way.
My friends and I made personal websites back in the day, before search engines were really a thing. I had a collection of some very basic "window sitter" shimejis I made (goth anime angels were all the rage back then). My one friend had a gallery for the wrestling events he attended, another was using hers as a journal, while another was using his to try and promote his self-published book (which wouldn't actually be finished for at least another eight years). One friend had a collection of really bad knock-knock jokes, with a "hidden" page dedicated to P⭐ Actresses he liked.
The internet back then was wild, but also felt a lot emptier than it does now. If you didn't know the address of a website, it may as well not even exist.
youll never understand the feeling of hope and futurist optimism of the early internet era…unless you were there at the time.
It was great
with how crappy social media has gotten in the 2020s, we're liable to see at least some return to things like blogs and personal sites.
Don't forget the rampant viruses on the old net. I was *appalled* that my workplace proudly declared their goal was a 10% fail rate on simulated phishing attacks with the world's sketchiest links. Then I realized that I was forged in the fires of the late 90s and early 00s internet and to this day mouse over every single link to check where it goes before clicking it.
Also, I think I've actually been to the evil overlord website. I remember the "cellblock" links, and I know I've encountered the list itself, but I can't remember if it was that exact page. I don't remember it being a black background.
My girlfriend has a Samsung Galaxy A01, I often jokingly call it her "cavephone" and I told a joke that while exploring a nearby city I found an old cave with rock paintings in it of people using Samsung Galaxy A01's. The reason I bring this up is because before the earliest version of Google Android used to resemble old desktop computers and her "Cavephone" looks a lot like a Microsoft Windows 7 device.
But before that we used to have Microsoft Windows Mobile, we used to have phones that looked like Microsoft Windows XP and people probably browsed these old websites on smartphones that looked like the desktops of the era. Maybe it would be a cool idea to explore the internet using such an old mobile device.
I was a lifeguard for ten years, and I swear I’ve seen that pool video. I bet it was one of the videos used in training/certification, I think it may even still be used depending on the certification. I’ve had both RedCross and StarGuard training, so for sure one of them used it
It seemed very familiar to me as well. Granted I’ve seen plenty of videos covering this sort of stuff and was never a life guard but I did take a bunch of swim safety classes in highschool through my gym class so thats possibly where I remember it from. Its a really useful website for training its just got a scary name!
13:17 tbf Goku *is* an alien, but bruh that's Vegeta
where even was the person drowning
That’s what I’m sayin
That was the point
Unfortunately I didn't live in a Nerd House, but always wanted to. Closest I got was the BBS we raised in college, and reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland in the 90s.
the idaho one made me laugh because i’m not even from the us, but when i was like 13 my aunt took in an exchange student - from idaho. so now i am 100% convinced that a) idaho does exist but b) it’s just farms. nothing else.
I miss 2leep. Anyone know similar websites?
That was when internet was at its peak right before things went down. The golden age of TH-cam was great. Back then, the internet had a mysterious touch to it. Ghost vids, conspiracies, rare unknown hidden lore. The internet left you wanting coming back for more.
Now, there’s no mystery to it.
I think my favorite part of the old Internet was AOL chat rooms. I still have friends I keep in touch with regularly.. I can't remember the name of the site, but there was a place where you could play flash games and get news.. I probably spent hours on the site and now I'm drawing a blank.
I remeber I found of random or too because I was interested in Japanese fashion on the French Gyaru blog. I didn't understand anything, but I always looked for updates because they always showed scans of Gyaru magazines. It was just a pure fans-for-fans thingy on the internet that I miss, especially back then when you liked something that was not popular, like anime or Japanese fashion.
I'd love to watch you revisit a 2D clicking RPG game called "Synthetic Reality: Well of Souls". It was basically created by two guys in their homes and for 1996 it's seriously in depth for a game to be created by only two guys.
I miss this internet of the 2000s. It was perfect back then.
It'd be really cool if there was a social media platform that specifically focused on recreating the old internet and the randomness of it, with anybody being able to create their own web 1.0-style website and add what they want to it. Similar to Wiby, you'd be able to be sent to a random site, or you could search up whatever topic you want to find. There'd be no likes or dislikes, but people would be able to upvote websites to show up higher on a search topic (though thinking about it this could easily be overrun by bots, so maybe not). It'd be so cool if something like this was a thing tho.
Neocities is doing this in a way
@@DebunkFile Oh yeah! Forgot about that lol
I actually haven't really looked at Neocities much before this and it's really awesome. Thanks for telling me about it!
Neocitiesw
Commented before I saw this ❤️
Make a part 3 if you haven't already! & Maybe do a 30 min special? Thanks.
Part 3 is very much planned, may take a little while but fret not it is coming sooner than you think!
something about the wobble town page caught my eye; at 8:03 bill wurtz' website is linked as 'archive of my videos' which strikes me as really strange, because i can't find any other relation between wobbletown and bill wurtz.
i think wobbletown is a fairly recent site, assuming that the wobbles age is displayed in days. the oldest ones are aged at around 700, meaning they were something over 2 years old. some of the sites it links to were made in 2022, which matches the 2 year mark. seems like a niche little friend project! still puzzled by what bill wurtz has to do with it tho
Wobble Town’s first archive on the Wayback Machine was in 2022, so I think it’s a modern piece dedicated to webcore
5:14 That's basically one of my older relatives during their younger dyas, but that one was before the internet
I argue it’s far more prevalent now. People using AI to create cp, onlyfans, sexual things being normalized
HOLY SHIT I REMEMBER THE EVIL OVERLORD LISTS
the guy u mentioned as Goku at 13:16 is actually Vegeta. Goku was featured further down on the page.
Incredibly sad what they did to the internet it used to be such a great thing
I grew up on the old internet, and I can't relate to your desire to graft the safety of the modern internet onto the 'soul' of the old internet. It's an impossible combo. The safety imposed on corporate platforms is what has given us the sanitized and bland internet of today.
Yes, the old internet was dirty. Some of the smut even became legends in their own right ala 2 girls one cup, lemon party and blue waffles. But there was a strange charm in uncovering those disgusting things just as you found charm in the more innocuous websites showcased in this video. I miss the old internet warts and all.
But with that smut came real creative freedom and communities. The "Wild West" days were just better. Imagine what we could do with THAT freedom and our current technical abilities
I would argue that there's things just as bad if not even worse in the current internet, but they simply get sweeped under the rug
Yeah, it's a very weak-minded mentality. I guess you could argue that some of these things may have been legitimately harmful to kids, but I think the things on the modern internet are just as much, if not far worse for kids. Nowadays, everything on the internet is designed by teams of corporate psychologists to be as mind-numbing and addictive as possible, particularly to children who lack psychological defenses. And you can still find all the bad stuff, plenty of it.
@@thenew4559There’s certainly not another BestGore or LiveLeak out there, shock sites solely are a thing of the past. The closest we had to it since was those propaganda videos from ISIS, what you’re thinking of is elsagate brainrot
Don't forget discovering goat.se for the first time 🤣
i think they showed us spot the drowning child when i was in school. idk, i have a very vague memory of it and it seems like something they’d show in school as like a psa, especially since it doesn’t end in tragedy
We gotta bring geek houses back.
For those of you who were around back in the day, Nightfall should remind you of "a little dog who won't stop following you around." IYKYK
I can't find it plz help @5:46
one of these old websites uses a ton of Nintendo / Konami music that used to be okay to use online in the times before TH-cam. I'm not going to ruin the surprise, that's up to you, tuber
10:24 This is just like the old adventure games (the ones that gave birth to the graphic adventure)
Pretty sure the Evil Overlord one started as a .txt file, that we'd pass along to each other via pre-internet BBSs and email. At any rate, the content of that site is what today you'd call a meme. It got around.
You mentioned the old internet was slower, but honestly, not much has changed there given the bloat on many sites today. I'd much rather load a news site over 56kbps that is simple text and maybe 3 low-res images, has no video ads popping up over the text, than today at broadband where a corp has tried to make the experience as grabby and frustrating as possible and the tab is taking up 2GB of memory to force 8 popups asking for my email address and cookie preferences, with moving ads every two paragraphs.
There's nothing stopping us from having that old web back. We've got the Wiby search engine (thank you so much for letting us all know about it!) so we can just get crackin making suits that'll appear on it. The illusion is that there's no point in making a sure that only 1000 people will see. But there is, and back then, 1000 views was a lot! We just have to reset our expectations of "success" and we can all have our own web again.
My last quarter at grad school may have saved my life with this course encouraging and showing us how to build html sites and RSS feeds and alternate web browser setups and all these other tools that give the control back to the user and we wrote weekly responses about how the shift away from personalization might correspond with other losses of freedom. I can't go back after that, tell everyone I'm camping out on the REAL internet until all this nonsense with bots/sheeple who make themselves like bots blows over
Not actually internet related but anyone remember Zoombinis??? It was this educational computer game that came out in 98. When I was 4th grade we'd go to the computer lab as a class where they had the really old apple computers, I don't even know if they were imacs but they were the original apple desktops that looked like mini old tv's all bulky and round. Anyway, they only thing we were allowed to do in the computer lab was play Zoombinis. Anyone?? Any millennials here?? Computers used to be so weird and strange. I can't believe I was there in the early years of it all. I was just a kid yes, but still I have pretty vivid memories.