This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Matt’s first impressions of and experiences with the Web sound a lot like mine (visiting those first few sites with Mosaic was a transformative experience for me, like falling in love), except I did quit grad school.
Greg reminded me that today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Suck. I started reading a few weeks after it launched, but I do remember going back to read the first article that kicked it off. Here’s a lengthy and comprehensive look at Suck’s history.
Andy Baio dug up this circa-1995 version of BobaWorld, one of my earliest favorite pages on the web. Boy, that square imagemap at the bottom of the page takes me back.
USA Today article from 1988 on computer viruses affecting the “INTERnet”.
Wired’s got a “10 years of the web” thing going on in their August 2005 issue. Web nostalgia is sooooo yesterday…
Yesterday was web nostalgia day on kottke.org, with nearly the entire day’s worth of remaindered links dedicated to blogging old school web memes and information as if I had just seen them for the first time. No reason really, just a bit of fun.
Oh, and something[1] tells me that the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe email is a fake.
[1] “Something” being the gigantic amount of email I received yesterday after posting this link. For a good 2 hours or so, an email arrived every two minutes telling me that the cookie thing was a hoax. It was kind of incredible, by far the most feedback I’ve gotten in several months. Boy, you folks don’t think much of me, do you? ;)
The Hyperreal home page has lots of information about rave music, rave culture, and drugs.
Sucksters Polly Ester and Terry Colon on Bubble Goo in the always excellent Filler.
Cello is a graphical WWW browser like Mosaic. “Cello runs under Microsoft Windows on any IBM PC with a 386SX chip or better. While we have run Cello with only 2MB of RAM on a 386SX-16 machine, we think you’ll like it better on a machine with more memory and a faster chip.”
Walter Miller’s Home page is the best personal home page on the WWW. “Yes Im in an abbusive relatonship. Hes in a whelchair but Im still scared of him. I know it sounds dumb. Some of his threats are to rip my lungs out throuhg my anes, then tie them around my head like Micky Mouse ears.”
This animation of a dancing baby is fun to watch. Email this one to your friends!
This one guy tried to get the word “sweatshop” printed on his custom Nike shoes and Nike wouldn’t let him. “The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word ‘sweatshop.’ Sweatshop is not: 1) another’s party’s trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately.”
The Hot or Not site lets you rate people’s pictures on a scale of 1 to 10. You can even upload your own picture to be rated.
Justin Hall documents his entire life on his WWW page, Justin’s Links from the Underground.
WiReD magazine on the Mosaic WWW browser and how it is “well on its way to becoming the world’s standard interface”. “Mosaic is the celebrated graphical ‘browser’ that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic’s charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext ‘links’ to other documents. By following the links — click, and the linked document appears — you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition.”
Hahaha! Look at all those hampsters dancing. Be sure to turn up the sound on this one!
Apparently, the Internet has a very last page after which, you’re all done. LOL, ROFL!
Hilarious home page of a lonely Turkish guy named Mahir who is seeking female companionship. “I kiss you!!!!”
URouLette takes you to a random homepage on the WWW each time you click it.
A woman who was charged $250 for a cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus gets her revenge by emailing the recipe to everyone she knows. “So here it is, please pass it on to someone or else or run a few copies…I paid for it, so now you can have it for free!!!”
The makers of the WWW browser Mosaic are keeping track of what’s new on the WWW. “Carnegie Mellon has announced their Web server; here’s the ‘Front Door’; here’s the home page. (‘Front door’… interesting metaphor, that.)”
It’s the Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything. When you push it, it really doesn’t do much.
David Filo and Jerry Yang are organizing the entire WWW into a hierarchical category system. They’ve named their site “Yahoo”.
Now that our favorite movies and old TV shows are so easy to find, will we still enjoy them?. I’ve been watching some old favorites from the 80s…I should have kept them there.
Long article from Fortune on the 10th anniversary of Netscape’s IPO. Features interviews with several of the key players.
Long, long, long, but good, good, good piece on Suck, “the first great website”.
A collection of Apple.com home page screenshots from 1996-present.
Great list of favorite memories from Sesame Street. I’d completely forgotten about the noo-ne-noo-ne-noo typewriter. I’m gonna be humming that all day now.
Stay Connected