I’ve been sitting on this question for a while, but got inspired to post by the Wikipedia question.
I. Love. Web 1.0 shit. I think a decent chunk of us using Lemmy do. Do you have any Wayback links you want to share? Bonus points if you have a story with them (mine, due to length and meandering, are in spoiler tags as an act of mercy).
A couple of mine:
Story
Several years ago, my wife and I were looking at places to move. One house we looked at was peculiar. There were bars on the basement windows (very rare here), big bookcases along every wall of the basement, and some weird fixtures that looked like they once housed electrical equipment. We passed on the place, but I got intensely curious about the former owner and started digging.
It turns out it was the home of Fred Ennis, a journalist and former Parliament Hill Bureau Chief. He created nepean.com as, in his words, “the first Internet community newspaper, with all the news but none of the paper”. He covered local events and goings on, and worked with columnists including one Don Nox, who wrote the linked article. Don’s quote here has stuck with me for a while:
Society is a very perverse device. If you stand in front of it and call it a stupid excuse for a machine, and a designer’s bad dream, it will suck you into it’s beater and turn you into dust and moldy straw. All anyone will ever remember is that you were weird. On the other hand, if you position yourself carefully and strategically off to one side and call it these very same names, it will shower you with candy, and sometimes loose change and small denomination bills. People in this position are called eccentrics. Now you know the difference.:::
Next, the homepage for The Church of the Universe, circa 2002
Story (spoiler tag removed due to formatting weirdness, mercy suspended)
To this day, there is nothing I find more interesting from a distance than new religious movements, and the early web was lousy with pages for them.
I came across this one while looking for backissues of Cannabis Culture, a once renowned underground publication out of Vancouver, BC, lead by activist-cum-political prisoner and libertarian weirdo Marc Emery. He’s an interesting character himself, but not the focus today.
While it seems you can only get physical backissues of CC from Ebay these days, they still host articles from way back, and these two from 1994 caught my attention. Checked out the organization’s website, and oh boy - if you like web 1.0 design and content quirks, you’re in for a treat. It’s a fascinating look at a group from a time when cannabis activism was filled with freaks and weirdos (said lovingly) - kind of miss those times v. the more corporatized cannabis ‘culture’ post-legalization.
Have a few more in mind if I can dig them up, but I’m curious what people end up sharing here!
Edit: Apparently I suck at spoiler tags.
Me again.
Story
It’s 2014. I’m writing an ill-conceived paper about LSD as a kind of ‘technological’ advancement in psychiatry and how that idea connects to themes in some American novels from the 1960s.
While researching, I come across a blurb about Hollywood Hospital, a facility in Vancouver BC that conducted LSD trials with their patients. This eventually leads me to a finding aid for a collection of lecture notes at Purdue University’s Archives and Special collections, where I learned the last person known to have the hospital’s files was supposedly one Frank Ogden.
Frank Ogden is an interesting character. A flight engineer during WWII, after the war he ran an airplane company at Toronto Island Airport. In 1961, after reading an article about LSD in a magazine he became interested in Hollywood Hospital’s activities. He sold his portion of the business, travelled to Vancouver and, in his words, “just knocked on the door”. With no medical background, but offering three months of free labour, medical director Dr. J. Ross MacLean hired him. Ogden took LSD under supervision twice, which was a relatively standard protocol for staff working with these patients. He then started working along side staff supporting these patients, which included ‘a large clientele from California’ - mostly said to be celebrities and the like looking for a kick.
Fast forward. Ogden eventually transitions to a career as a futurist under the moniker Dr. Tomorrow, living in a houseboat in Vancouver. He did speaking engagements, wrote books, hosted a radio show, etc. He died at 92 on December 29th, 2012.
Super interesting guy, and worth further digging into if you’re curious (I know I’m revisiting him now that I’ve written this, lol). But I noticed something interesting when I dug up his homepage. It was now redirecting to something called the Global Consciousness Project, a parapsychology initiative. This is a weird one - basically, the theory is that events causing widely experienced, shared emotions or attention could have an effect on the output of hardware random number generators, and fluctuations in output could be a measure of a ‘global consciousness’. It’s batshit, but fascinating at the same time. The questions I had at the time were “Why this, over anything else, as the redirect? What happened between May 3 2009 and February 17 2010 where this was the choice? Unrelated, but WHERE ARE THE FUCKING HOSPITAL FILES??”.
I walked away. Ultimately, I had a paper to finish, and while fascinating this was becoming a timesink. But this man lives rent free in my head to this day
Pointlesssites.com is a treasure trove of weird and interesting sites that’s still up today and still gets updated. If you find ones that don’t work, Wayback is your best friend for this site.
My personal favorite is tane.us
Well, this was the best thing I’ve ever read on the Internet.
I check a hatfull of old links -every day- (a sort of hobby), and am constantly surprised to see all they’ve stashed away there.
Recommend their browser extension for that. If you come across a page that fails to load, it will tell you if it -knows- people have asked it save a copy. If not, and you paste the failed URL into the ‘Search URL’ box, there’s about a 2 in 3 chance you will come up a winner.
If you land on a working page that you really like, and it doesn’t have a memory of it, it will -usually- save it for you if you click on -Save Page Now-. Yeah, that’s YOU backing up the good stuff.
Lately I’ve seen stuff going back as far the late 90s. One of my most-useful extensions… and there’s a lot out there worth saving!
I don’t know if I’d call it a favorite, but Time Cube is pretty iconic of Internet zaniness for a certain period. It went down in 2015, a decade ago now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
https://web.archive.org/web/20150506055228/http://www.timecube.com/index.html
I fuckin’ love me some Time Cube. Great pull!
badger badger badger badger badger…
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
(I was hoping for cool little weird corners of internet history, or just regular people who used to have websites for interesting reasons, but I’ll take proto-memes too)
Fair point. 😜
Does OG Stumbleupon count, then? 🙇🏼♂️🥲
It’s available via Wayback (albeit not fully functional), so you know what? Yes!
I used to have it as my default browser page. I got very little done online, but hey, I’m a trove of random knowledge that even a lifetime of weed can’t fog away! 🤣🤘🏼
Not a way back machine link but it’s one of my favourite old websites:
There’s a very particular warm, relaxed feeling I get whenever I visit this website.
I call it Zombo Calm, and it’s something special.
Probably going to come back with other Wayback links of interest between today and tomorrow, but in the spirit of some of the responses so far:
Best paired with the following on repeat: https://youtu.be/zh1GCx2CcKM?t=0m48s
Sadly, that Church of the Universe link won’t load for me.
Dang! Works for me, but admittedly takes a bit longer to load than other links I’ve used. Is it giving a specific error, out of curiosity?
If truly hopeless, bask in this glorious homepage image:
Thank you!
It actually loads now. There was no error, just Zeno’s progress bar.