Posts about Nostalgia (RSS, JSON)

9AM — Classic Web posts “screenshots of classic websites and blogs from Dot-Com, Web 2.0 and the 2010s.” Spelunking in the Wayback Machine, indulging in old-fashioned web design is one of my favourite past times. So this is right up my alley.

8AM — Today I learned: Those old visitor trackers where you embed an image on your website, they still exist. The Diamond Geezer blog uses eXTReMe Tracking [sic], which has been around since I first laid eyes on the World Wide Web. I had one of these on each of my websites in the late 90s and early 2000s and assumed they all but vanished since Goole Analytics arrived.

6PM — Old’aVista is a search engine for the old web. Enter keyword and it returns links to sites archived on the Wayback Machine and The Old Net. (via)

2PM — The 88x31 GIF Collection. Last year, I linked to a similar collection of nostalgic early-internet GIFs, but this one has over 4,000 images.

5PM — Wiby is a search engine that indexes simple, non-commercial web pages; you know the ones that made you fall in love with the Web. Surprise me… opens a random web site from the index. Feels like it’s 1998 again.

9AM — Many old LEGO building instructions are available in the Internet Archive. Sadly it doesn’t contain sets from the early 90s yet, like the airport or fire station I had as a child. (via)

8AM — Some guy in Massachusetts had 2,200 units of the the NABU, an obscure 1980s networked computer, stored in a barn. He sold them on eBay, and an online community has formed between the folks who now own one.

7AM — The Web Design Museum is an absolute time sink and the source of nostalgic feelings about me being young again and discovering the Internet. It includes some popular old bloggers like Kottke, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Jonathan Snook, and an early Blogger design.

2PM

A couple of fun emulators allow you to experience old Macintosh operating systems in the browser. System 6 is 34 years old, System 7 is 31, Mac OS 8 is 25, and Mac OS 9 is 21. How oddly familiar these old systems look and feel, even to someone who has only ever worked with Mac OSX. Many things are remixes, indeed. (via)

5PM — “It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive”:

The internet was pretty fun, when it was just this thing that you used occasionally, before you carried it around in your pocket and it became the way that millions of shopped, socialized, researched, and looked for love. When it was a curio. I think I got my first email address when I was a senior and remembered to check it maybe once a month.

Yeah the 90s were great. Not the fashion, or the Eurodance music. But everything else was and we had the Internet before it was gentrified, and it was new and raw and exciting.

1PM — The Instagram generation has discovered the aesthetic of point-and-shot-cameras. Every trend comes around in twenty-year cycles. I should have held on to my Canon Powershot A60 from 2003; I could be the cool old bloke now, who was there when it all happened.

5PM — A nice bit of internet nostalgia:

a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990’s and 2000’s, including the famous “Netscape NOW” and “Internet Explorer” buttons

I’ll definitely put one of those on the site soon.