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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
This is just barely in the 1990's, but The Conversatron comes to mind.
There was quite the cottage industry around Quake in the 1990's. From GameSpy for finding matches/servers, to news and modding sites for which I can't quite recall the names.
There's also countless companies and startups that either went bust or were eaten by other companies.
Meanwhile, there's stuff still online from then that has no right to be. SpaceJam comes to mind.
Altavista - the first Search Engine.
Remember Angel fire?
Not any one site, but a class of pages you might call the "tilde sites." That is, personal sites served from the user's home directory on a multiuser host. Like: http://cs.example.edu/~user/
altavista - best pre-Google search engine. It would probably be the best post-Google-enshittification search engine today too.
astalavista.box.sk was "better" at finding certain "things"
Not a site but a feature: web rings
You're on a site about radio control toys, at the bottom is a ring control go to a thematically related site, maybe find your way around the ring to it's start
Oh man, you just unlocked memories of a handful of cryptid and urban legend websites I used to crawl as a kid that were all linked together.
Used to spend hours trying to be quiet in the living room reading weird nosleep-style stories. Fuck I miss the early web. Web 4.0 sucks.
i ran across a web ring not that long ago. took me back---way back.
edit: do NOT go to webring dot org. domain is owned by scammers. dot com isn't the old thing either.
Angelfire ones! So...much...pink...
notbencejon.com
It was a blog written by a young guy who had an amazing ability to put his struggles into words. I was an angry/sad teenager at the time and reading his blog made me feel like I wasn't the only one. I hope he's out there and doing ok. He loved the band Sloan and his family.
I've tried a few times to find a trace of his blog, and no such luck.
There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it'll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.
It was amusing. I can't remember the name. I am sadness.
GeoCities
Geocites is no more, but there are multiple archives of those web pages:
Neocities?
I keep meaning to look at setting up a neocities site
geocities
Check out neocities.org. I have my own, BossHobbies.neocities.org
I don't know, but none of my AOL keywords work anymore.
The world's first webpage is still up.
https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Looks a lot like a typical gopher node (or, today, gemini node). Hierarchical tree, link, brief description attached to each link.
I remember watching that page on an Arena browser in an XWindows terminal on Solaris or SunOS. Back then, it was still hosted on the Cube on Tims desk.
And the description I got for this WWW project was "A system like GOPHER, but with hypertext".
So nostalgia much wow
Much less important than some of these, but there was a British history teacher, Jonathan Pagel, who made some "history raps" for his class back around 1995 and 1996. His website went down many years ago, but the URL was still embedded in a comment in one of the files that I had, and I dug them up with archive.org's Wayback Machine.
They were released under the GNU FDL, so I can repost them:
Not from the 90s but around 2007 I think. There was a private torrent tracker called something like UGS-torrents. Where UGS stood for underground sounds. Pretty sure it was based in the UK and it focused on electronic and club music singles being released at the time from a bunch of smaller producers. Unique stuff I'm not even sure what to call the genre to be able to look for it today but a lot of it was adjacent to drum and bass, 2-step, or break beats. Super active forums with members making and sharing DJ mixes. I've been out of the scene for quite a while now but the few times I've searched for any mention of this place I've found nothing. If anyone has any information I'd appreciate it if you could share.
Two games, likely flash, but possibly just JavaScript and stuff. I remember accessing through dedicated webpages.
One was a puzzle game that had a planet and a bunch of items to place on it. The game let you place each item only once, and the items would have different interactions depending on which order you placed them in. So if you use the seed before the water, it would grow. But if you placed the fan down before the water, it would create a storm which would make the seed grow even more...or something like that.
The other one was a game where you leveled up like an RPG with stat points, but the stats were just how long or wide your sword is. Power too, I think. Your character followed your mouse cursor, and clicking would swing the sword. You could choose different areas where different monsters with different stats would appear, chasing you, and you could kill them for more experience. Almost a proto Vampire Saviours, I guess
Do you mean Grow Cube?
Thank you, but that's not it! Definitely the same principle though! Very neat.
Woah you just unlocked some hidden memories for me. It was a whole series of grow games by eyemaze. Very creative, very fun
Good to know! I wonder if they made the one I'm thinking of too, or if one inspired the other
thecreepingeyemorgue.com
That site was later renamed to the more familiar rotten.com, which also apparently no longer exists.
Netscape, I guess
Fry's Electronics, too, tho technically the memorial site is still up
sixdegrees.com
It was one of the very first social networking sites. I met my partner through there in a random chat room.
It was based on the six degrees of separation thing. You could see from any user if you were connected and through how many degrees.
I don’t remember much anymore, besides it being a place where you could meet people.
The innocence of the old internet....
Back then it was "wow! So cool that they know how all of us are connected!",
now it's "NOOOO! nobody should have this kind of info in me! Who are they selling it to???"
Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don't wanna read about such things.
spoiler
rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today's standards though.
steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.
When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.
One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I'm sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡
You weren't the only one searching for porn.
*.demon.co.uk and *.xs4all.nl, both now defunct european ISPs that made it easy for people to host pages. IIRC the future sound of London had their page at demon, and xs4all hosted all kinds of nerdy/OSS pages, and some weird music, too ;) Oh, and there was *.free.fr, too
Astroatlas. Was my first glimpse into "you can make your own website" and blew my damn mind.
As the first boom turned to bust, fuckedcompany.com was a snarky look behind the curtain of the dumb we all built.
gossip.babeleweb.net
Let's just say that an archive of Penthouse Pet pictorials in the age before internet video was an absolute goldmine for 12-year-old me.
Suck.com (political and social commentary) and Plastic.com (an early, richly featured forum site) were both really good
