cozy 90s BBS forums, obscure blogs, etc.
I was there, Gandalf, when we named hosts after your horse and didn’t pronounce the “dot” in “.com”
Not a website, but since you mention BBSes…one thing that would look pretty familiar to a 1990s Internet user would be most of the text-based MUDs, the ancestor of MMORPGs, that are around.
The MUD Connector is still around, and still has a list of active MUDs.
While I suspect that most dedicated MUDders use dedicated clients, the base protocol is still normally telnet, and you can use a plain old telnet client to play…a protocol that predates Internet Protocol itself.
I still mud on occasion. I used TinyFugue back when i started mudding in 88 or 89 (maybe lot was 89/90). I then used zMUD and later cMUD for years. Now I use MUDlet.
removed by mod
jwz.org/blog, for obvious reasons.
My healthcare services websites. Their website and mobile app require separate logins. The website logs in then redirects to a completely different website.
They have a tax-free “store” that feels like a completely different website.
Everything is laid out using what seems like the idea of middle management and not modern design philosophy.
TreasuryDirect also feels classic. If you’re not familiar, it’s a US government website to buy and sell certain types of treasury bonds. Some great features:
- an image so you know you didn’t typo your username (haven’t seen that in well over a decade)
- clicking a link is a new page, and clicking back breaks stuff and makes you login again
- until recently, you couldn’t paste in the password field
It does do some modern-ish things with page layout, but not that modern, like maybe early 2000s modern. But it’s perennially stuck about 20 years in the past.
gradients, animated GIFs, “best browsed on”, and a frame once you click enter. Only thing it’s missing is an index page.
frame
Now, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Story time: In the super old days, I want to say 1996? 1997? I wrote a four or five line HTML that would split the screen into two horizontal frames, then split those each into vertical frames, then those horizontal – ad infinitum.
I don’t think there were any browsers that didn’t fail that test. I’m sure I only checked IE3 or IE4 and Netscape. One of them locked the computer up and had to be killed via “close program.” The other one locked the machine up and it became completely unresponsive, needing to be hard booted.
Excellent example.
How is it that 2 days after this posted no one has said “Craigslist.”
Aw i miss when website tracking was only “xxxx users have visited this page” and it was just a simple counter that counted up.
I remember being so proud when I implemented that on my first website.
Yep! I did it for a final project, called DANK WEB. We implemented an airhorn counter. We found out the day before that it just stored the value it saw +1 to the DB so a bad actor could reset the count. Then we easily figured out that we could just reference the DB so we fixed the bad actor part.
We got a 98 on the final. It was the most fun I had on a project in all of college.
THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!
Don’t forget signing the guest list.
Not the original, but…
Ebay
I imagine their source code is such an unmaintainable mess that it’s impossible to modernize
it was written in FORTRAN