I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
A stylesheet for when you’re nostalgic for the old Mac OS.
❤️
I believe we aren’t nostalgic for the technology, or the aesthetic, or even the open web ethos. What we’re nostalgic for is a time when outsiders were given a chance to do something fun, off to the side and left alone, because mainstream culture had no idea what the hell to do with this thing that was right in front of it.
Why do we long for a time when the average life span was 22 and everyone was wracked by tuberculosis?
This was the problem I had with Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (and to a lesser extent with Rutger Bregman’s Humankind):
Paleolithic peoples, so the tale goes, spent most of Tuesday strolling under Baobab trees, running their hands through the long elephant grass, and breathing in the sweet dust of the open Savannah. On Wednesdays they carefully chipped away the edges of Levallois blades, swept dust out of the home cave, and snacked on freshly gathered almonds. On Thursdays they gathered into small bands – a hand-picked selection of the finest endurance runners this side of Nairobi – tracked down an elephant, and sprinted after it barefoot for nine hours until the creature – dehydrated, exhausted, and unable to sweat out the excess heat – crumpled into a violently sad face-plant in the hot, gritty sand. Our strapping, supple ancestors jogged to a halt beside it, barely out of breath, to carve up its flesh and bring home the elephant bacon. Later that evening they would break their 36 hour intermittent fast, retire to the lake, and engage in polyamorous affairs.
Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web.
I spent far too long hitting refresh and then clicking on the names of some of the Irish bands down near the bottom of the line-up.
This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.
This could’a, should’a, would’a been a great blog post.
March 1981: Shakin’ Stevens was top of the charts, Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who and Clive Sinclair was bringing computers to the masses. Britain was moving into a new age, and one object above all would herald its coming.
Digital seems like it’s forever because it’s infinitely reproducible, but someone has to think to make that canonical copy or it’s gone-gone.
In this five-year old eulogy for a BBS, Alexis Madrigal ponders the deaths of social networks. Friendster, MySpace, Vine …plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
A lovely reminiscence from Matt on how he came to fall in love with the World Wide Web.
I really hope he posts this on his own site—it’ll be a shame when this disappears along with everything else being posted to Medium.
Such a vividly nostalgic project. Choose an obsolete browser. Enter a URL. Select which slice of the past you want to see.
Digital archives in action. Access drives preservation.
There are Inception-like layers of nostalgia here: firstly, this web series of web pages made by Matt are a throwback to an earlier era, and secondly, the story being told goes all the way back to the birth of the ARPAnet.
This is such a delightful story of a brilliant mistake—true typographic nerdery and nostalgia.
Read all the way through for a free gift.
A bit of web history reacted by Paravel: the Microsoft homepage from 1994. View source to see some ooooold-school markup.
Ah, memories!
The Old Aesthetic.
Wallow in nerd nostalgia and experience the Proustian rush of rebooting old operating systems.
Wired Magazine break with tradition by publishing a halfway interesting article (though you’ll still need Readability or Instapaper to make the experience of reading it bearable).
The manual that came with the ZX81 has been lovingly converted to HTML. This was my first contact with programming (or computers, for that matter).
Nostalgia and sexual awakening plotted on a Google Map is a voyeuristic thing.