people often say they can find this kind of thing via my employer, Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
How is it that 2 days after this posted no one has said “Craigslist.”
It's not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It's based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It's a beautiful thing.
Lookup brutalist websites or the gemini protocol.
4-ch.net (not to be confused with 4chan) is a 90s BBS that is still online and occasionally active. It's neat to see posts from the 90s still on the front page.
wow nobody mentioned https://www.lingscars.com/
Aw i miss when website tracking was only "xxxx users have visited this page" and it was just a simple counter that counted up.
Don't forget signing the guest list.
I remember being so proud when I implemented that on my first website.
THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!!
Yep! I did it for a final project, called DANK WEB. We implemented an airhorn counter. We found out the day before that it just stored the value it saw +1 to the DB so a bad actor could reset the count. Then we easily figured out that we could just reference the DB so we fixed the bad actor part.
We got a 98 on the final. It was the most fun I had on a project in all of college.
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html
I’m pretty sure spacejam.com showed that page up until the sequel supplanted it.
From a time when websites used
<table>orposition: absolute;to place elements on the screen. That website is just one big table.I feel that right in the MySpace.
textfiles.com still looks like the 90s. It has stories, jokes, essays, and generally interesting stuff.
Really awesome old school sites. Crazy gifs, web rings, etc.
That is probably the best website on the internet!
I haven’t visited in a long time – but I can’t imagine Craigslist has changed much.
It has not, though there really isn't much posted there anymore. Facebook marketplace has replaced it for most stuff. :(
Craigslist is slightly cleaner looking that it used to be but the functionality and button placement is identical. I much prefer it to Facebook marketplace or OfferUp.
Ebay
I imagine their source code is such an unmaintainable mess that it’s impossible to modernize
it was written in FORTRAN
And pretty much the rest of the FSF and GNU websites.
Debian’s website….
hey, thats not fair, they redid it a few years back /s
Kernel.org, home of the Linux kernel, hasn't changed much.
Kernel.org today:
Kernel.org in 1998:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980130085039/https://kernel.org/
Along the same lines,
slackware.com today:
slackware.com in 2001:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010404232132/http://www.slackware.com/
https://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
(Not really mobile friendly, which holds true to the old school Internet)
Your link seems to be incorrectly formatted.
Whoops, thanks, fixed it!
Florida’s unemployment website
Sites that have old forums. There aren't many anymore, but ones I've seen that have been very helpful of late include car sites, a timeshare forum, and the Fantasy Grounds forum (my virtual tabletop of choice).
I'm sure there are others out there, but it's definitely more rare than it used to be. Is Something Awful still around?
If you want one that isn't actually from that time, just feels like it, I'd say https://tildes.net/
Not a website, but since you mention BBSes...one thing that would look pretty familiar to a 1990s Internet user would be most of the text-based MUDs, the ancestor of MMORPGs, that are around.
The MUD Connector is still around, and still has a list of active MUDs.
While I suspect that most dedicated MUDders use dedicated clients, the base protocol is still normally telnet, and you can use a plain old telnet client to play...a protocol that predates Internet Protocol itself.
I still mud on occasion. I used TinyFugue back when i started mudding in 88 or 89 (maybe lot was 89/90). I then used zMUD and later cMUD for years. Now I use MUDlet.
Not the original, but...
All of them, if you browse with Links.
LYNX v2.9.2 released in May 2024.
For better experience I recommend
elinks.
Still in active development.pretty sure links is just a link to elinks now in most distros.
Your way back search engine https://wiby.me It even comes a surprise me button
I have the suprise page set as start page in my browser, so i get a surprise website, when i open a browser window.
Some examples that I remember are:
- The Berkshire Hathaway's website (https://berkshirehathaway.com/)
- The UNIX website (https://unix.org/version4/)
- Xorg Project website (https://www.x.org/wiki/)
- Marginalia Web Search (https://search.marginalia.nu/)
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) pages containing Standards (e.g.: https://www.w3.org/TR/controller-document/)
- Pd (Puredata) Project Website (https://puredata.info/)
TIL Timecube is no longer up. That was my go to site for what the internet used to be like.
aw man that site was like Dr Bronner's took some digital mushrooms
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/An Introduction to Everything2 - massively interlinked information site
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ - robots and people comic
https://realultimatepower.net/ - ninjas
Has Real Ultimate Power actually changed at all/added new content? I was reading that in elementary.
I see YouTube videos linked, and I remember being on this site before YouTube existed. I don't think it has changed all that much, though.
Nope, exact same html.
Extremely useful website for collectors of dead media formats (LD, D-VHS, HD-DVD, CED, VHD, etc.) Still has an old style interface with priority given to function and utility over styling. Also has a storefront where you can buy and sell discs.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is a search engine for non-commercial content and is pretty great regarding the old-school factor :-)
My healthcare services websites. Their website and mobile app require separate logins. The website logs in then redirects to a completely different website.
They have a tax-free “store” that feels like a completely different website.
Everything is laid out using what seems like the idea of middle management and not modern design philosophy.
TreasuryDirect also feels classic. If you're not familiar, it's a US government website to buy and sell certain types of treasury bonds. Some great features:
- an image so you know you didn't typo your username (haven't seen that in well over a decade)
- clicking a link is a new page, and clicking back breaks stuff and makes you login again
- until recently, you couldn't paste in the password field
It does do some modern-ish things with page layout, but not that modern, like maybe early 2000s modern. But it's perennially stuck about 20 years in the past.
They are trying to be 90s, but I love it. I thought they had a site counter at some point, but maybe I am misremembering and it was just the guest book.
gradients, animated GIFs, "best browsed on", and a frame once you click enter. Only thing it's missing is an index page.
frame
Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Story time: In the super old days, I want to say 1996? 1997? I wrote a four or five line HTML that would split the screen into two horizontal frames, then split those each into vertical frames, then those horizontal -- ad infinitum.
I don't think there were any browsers that didn't fail that test. I'm sure I only checked IE3 or IE4 and Netscape. One of them locked the computer up and had to be killed via "close program." The other one locked the machine up and it became completely unresponsive, needing to be hard booted.
Excellent example.
No JavaScript sites on onionland
Slashdot is closed source, use SoylentNews instead.
I'm on a couple forum sites still (both phpbb I think). I still read fark.com but rarely if ever comment anymore.
I get most of the stills for my Star Trek memes from trekcore.com which has a pretty old-web feel to it.
If killing someone would help, I would kill for a Star Wars site like that
most private trackers
Anything they use at my work lol
I love the old simple powerful websites at companies I've worked for. It's when they add a bunch of whitespace and a chatbot that they really start to go to hell.
Yeah nah, this is old late 00s web sites that's have to load whenever you change something.
jwz.org/blog, for obvious reasons.
telnet bbs.lunduke.comOh man, fuck Bryan Lunduke. He aged like milk.
They both look the same on mobile. 🤷🏻♀️
https://www.vernoncoleman.com/
Feels very home made.
Hubski
https://bobistheoilguy.com/ and the oil forums.
It's pretty niche, but https://alternativess.com (sport archery retailer)
