Comments on: Comments on 11513

Post number 11513

waxpancake — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:03:32 -0800

The Wayback Machine. Explore Metafilter and Blogger from October 1999. Search Google in 1998 or read Salon in 1997. Visit Word, Yahoo, c|net, Feed, Crashsite, Cool Site of the Day, Village Voice, and NYTimes from 1996. Congratulate Mathowie on his new job in 1997, see Kottke's redesign from October 1999, Glassdog's 3-D logos from 1997, and Zeldman's pages optimized for Netscape 3.0. (Unsurprisingly, Jakob's site hasn't changed much since 1996.) Surf the past and share your greatest nostalgic finds.

By: joemaller

joemaller — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:08:24 -0800

Cool! My snowman is still there! I miss my snowman.

By: lheiskell

lheiskell — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:18:42 -0800

sniff...I miss Word.

By: palegirl

palegirl — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:43:52 -0800

oh my god, you can't put anything behind you, can you?! wow. that's great. i'm so embarassed!

By: ktheory

ktheory — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:58:05 -0800

This is a really fascinating link. With the web medium, the content tends to be permanent. The web's a great medium for archiving information. But the design is transient. Major sites have facelifts every couple of months, and we're quick to forget what the site was like without the fresh new look and usability enhancements. The Wayback machine archives the design of the web as well as the content. Fascinating. (humble reminder: self-linking is still not appropriate)

By: SisterHavana

SisterHavana — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 22:58:10 -0800

Oh my God. My loving tribute to my car is still floating around out there. : )

By: Succa

Succa — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:16:43 -0800

Sweet! This is amazing! Thank you, Mister or Missus Wax Pan Cake.

By: gluechunk

gluechunk — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:20:10 -0800

ktheory, self-linking within a thread is sometimes appropriate. per the guidelines: "(note: it's ok to link to your own things as comments in threads, if it adds to the discussion..."

By: riffola

riffola — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:25:55 -0800

Wonder how big their database must be.

By: Down10

Down10 — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:28:00 -0800

For a REAL timewarp, look at the original Yahoo! pages from 1994, back when it was hosted on the Standford Web servers. Formated for your Mosaic browser! How innocent it all seemed...

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:35:55 -0800

Oh my god, they have my cute 'n fuzzy bunny design from mid-1997. This is the coolest thing ever.

By: sylloge

sylloge — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:39:42 -0800

> ktheory, self-linking within a thread is sometimes appropriate. And in this case, self-linking is absolutely encouraged, I'd say.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:45:28 -0800

Ev's first evhead (1998) has the tagline "web profitizing"

By: owillis

owillis — Mon, 15 Oct 2001 23:56:38 -0800

It's not archived, but in '97 it seems I had an interest in the Oprah Winfrey show and attractive women on MSNBC. Some things never change.

By: MiguelCardoso

MiguelCardoso — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 00:31:48 -0800

What can you say?!

By: dong_resin

dong_resin — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 00:47:38 -0800

One thing is for certain, that's just a hell of a nice snowman.

By: youhas

youhas — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 00:56:23 -0800

Sweet Jebus, my college website is hidden away in there in all its orange-and-periwinkle-on-black splendor. Mercifully, the epilepsy-inducing animated GIFs are nowhere to be seen....

By: klint

klint — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 01:08:24 -0800

Disinfo from around 1999

By: Nothing

Nothing — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 02:32:18 -0800

What a trip. There's the first draft of my first personal page in there, but not the final working version. *laugh* Also, the first page I ever contracted to design, a Seattle helicopter company that I believe no longer exists. (the domain's not resolving anymore anyway) The animated helicopter at the top was CUTTING EDGE! *laugh*

By: lizardboy

lizardboy — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 03:21:50 -0800

Justin Hall's site from December, 1996
It's not the changes in design that are all that notable, but rather, what he was talking about. If he only knew what a commercialized piece of bile the web would become...
Not that I'm bitter, of course.

By: aki

aki — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 03:43:04 -0800

Is it just my bad luck or how come URL's with tilda's in them (ie: mostly user pages like www.whatever.com/~whoever) return results stored in the database, but can not be retrieved?

By: lucien

lucien — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 04:57:45 -0800

Three gold stars for your homework this week, waxpancake.

By: eoz

eoz — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 05:40:50 -0800

What was Zeldman thinking when he used that pink?!

By: tpoh.org

tpoh.org — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 06:27:32 -0800

Damn, I was hoping they'd have an archive of my first web page to get publicized in book form - actually, it might be there, someone else was having problems pulling up a tilde'd page as well.

By: CarlMalamud

CarlMalamud — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 07:41:27 -0800

> Wonder how big their database must be. > posted by riffola at 11:25 PM PST on October 15 I think they're up to the 100 terabyte range.

By: moss

moss — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 09:01:49 -0800

Bother! I can't seem to connect. And I'd been hoping for ages that they'd make the archive available over the web.

By: ethmar

ethmar — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 09:42:55 -0800

I can't connect either, but then again I'm searching for tripe and piffle (my stuff). My stuff, as you may be aware, is not "A-List" material. A-List! A-List! Roswell! Roswell! :-P

By: ethmar

ethmar — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 10:17:11 -0800

My stuff, as you may be aware, is not "A-List" material. So much in fact, that I got the following response: Sorry, no matches. Roswell! Roswell!

By: kokogiak

kokogiak — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:17:46 -0800

Hilarious. I love this. Here's my original ticket into the professional web world in 1997, an (ugly) compilation of Pacific Northwest Media websites that I'd been building for a couple years. I used it to convince my employer that A) I knew what I was doing and B) to let me take over their website (it worked). I get a kick out of my bizarre attempt at an obfuscated counter (upper left corner), and my 'best viewed in' tag for IE 3. Also fun - what MSNBC.com looked like when I joined in early 1997 (remember the long ladder of alternating stories?).

By: ethmar

ethmar — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:25:48 -0800

Good grief! I got one hit for one of my sites, and I've been waiting for a half hour for the page to load! How is everyone cruising through this database when I'm on a T1 for cry-yi? Baaandwidth....baaaandwidth for the poor...

By: kokogiak

kokogiak — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:28:43 -0800

Ethmar, if you're on a long wait, try stopping/reloading your page again - seemed to work for me.

By: sylloge

sylloge — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 15:49:16 -0800

I don't think bandwidth the problem. I'd imagine that most of the archived material is compressed somehow and it probably takes a while to address and decompress the HTML, images, etc. There is a lot of CPU intensive stuff for their server to do -- sometimes it is unusably slow, but it seems to pick up now and again. Stopping and reloading worked for me too, but only sometimes. Lots of waiting.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 16:18:10 -0800

Whew! A friend had some legal action a while back which involved the removal of personally harassing content from a website. (I can't get any more specific.) I checked, it looks like they didn't get it. I'm sure they'd remove it under the circumstances, but it's good my friend won't have to go through any of that again ....

By: lotsofno

lotsofno — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 18:04:37 -0800

doh.. they didn't archive my bright green page (my first one) from my members.aol.com days.

By: moss

moss — Wed, 17 Oct 2001 22:37:26 -0800

I finally managed to connect to it. It didn't have an archive of PBOT. That was the only thing I wanted. *cries*