Wikipedia:WikiProject Websites/Early web history task force/FreeAssociation

Free Association
Use this to engage in free association so that contributors can help "prompt" each other's memory of what the Web once was, and brainstorm ideas. Feel free to add anything that comes to mind, and rearrange thoughts.


 * The &lt;blink&gt; tag
 * And animated gifs!
 * The multiple-body bug in Netscape 1.1, which allowed a crude fade-in effect. This was fixed in 1.2. Anyone else remember it?
 * Pre-CSS HTML style (serifed font, blue links, purple visited links)
 * Netscape Navigator
 * "This page best viewed with Netscape Navigator" (snag a copy of the Netscape icon from here)
 * "Internet in a Box"
 * Netcom,This company sent out FREE discs with it's browser "NetCruiser" and Internet connection phone numbers in the L.A. area in 1995. It required minimum: IBM-compatible PC with a 386 or greater processor, 9600-baud modem or greater, Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 5.0 (or greater) or Windows 95, 4 Mbytes of RAM. Price was $19.95 a month.
 * www.tripod.com was an "underground" FREE web site host/online editor in 1995.


 * www.links.net is actually an excellent research source, since Justin has faithfully kept online nearly everything he wrote since January 1994.
 * hey cool, i was wondering if he had archives of his pages. i am thrilled to see two of the projects i was involved in on this 1/94 page: SITO (then OTIS, still alive), and UWI's Web's Edge (frozen, but online since then). has it really been twelve+ years? Jon Lon Sito 09:51, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Hotwired
 * The Spot
 * IMDB when it was indie
 * IMDB when it was located at University of Wales
 * i remember when it was (co-?)run by Murray Chapman, who also did the Blade Runner FAQ
 * www.happypuppy.com downloads
 * whitehouse.gov came online in 1993
 * Here's a great story about working there in 1996:


 * senate.gov and www.house.gov came online in 1994
 * thomas.gov came online in January 1995
 * NSFNET stopped being the backbone in 1995
 * HyperDiscordia! i remember being thrilled to find this way back.  according to their old news (and if i am doing my Discordian calendar math right, they started in 1994.
 * The hype around Java & VRML!
 * Mapquest launched on Feb 5, 1996

Pre-1995 Sites
Finding info on pre-95 sites is hard! How about:
 * Bianca's Smut Shack
 * Femmes Femmes Femmes Je Vous Aime
 * Digital Picture Archive on the 17th floor
 * The Spot
 * HotWired
 * Cool Site of the Day
 * The World-Wide Web Virtual Library
 * David Siegel
 * http://www.museumofbadart.org (1994)
 * Internet Underground Music Archive
 * The Nine Planets

Early Web Humor
(early = 1995 and earlier):
 * Doctor Fun (first web comic?)
 * The Useless Pages
 * And the ToiletCam!
 * Mirsky's Worst of the Web
 * Suck.com
 * Dysfunctional Family Circus, a co-operative venture into humor, similar to the Internet Oracle.

Navigation Sites

 * Lycos
 * WWWW - the WORLD WIDE WEB WORM
 * Yahoo!
 * Webcrawler
 * DejaNews
 * Alta Vista
 * Ask Jeeves
 * Magellan (Search Engine)
 * WebCrawler
 * Excite
 * Inkomti
 * NSCA home page
 * Netscape's original home page (which was set by default in every copy of the browser).

February 8, 1996

 * The signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996
 * The controversial Communications Decency Act in the above
 * The Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign and pages turned to black on that day because of the CDA
 * 24 Hours in Cyberspace

Award sites

 * Best of the Web awards (goes back to 1994)
 * best websites of 1995
 * Dwight Silverman's Best of 1995 Awards (Journalist for the Houston Chronicle)
 * Article about Cool Site of the Year 1995 (I couldn't find the actual awards page)
 * Yahoo!'s Picks of the Year 1996
 * Cool Site of the Year 1996

Gopher stuff

 * Archie
 * Veronica
 * Jughead (I can actually remember trying to figure out if Veronica or Jughead was a better tool)
 * I assume we're sticking to Web history - other Internet resources have their own history. Although it should be mentioned that a lot of Web culture actually started by Gopher, popular FTP sites, Usenet, etc.
 * So does that mean SIMTEL is included or excluded? I can think of reasons for either position.

Pre-Netscape Browsers
For those who haven't experienced the second through fifth ones, there is an excellent emulator of them.
 * WorldWideWeb
 * Line-mode browser
 * Lynx (web browser)
 * Mosaic (web browser)
 * Cello (web browser)

Old Starting Points
Someone has a mirror of one of Bob Allison's Bobaworld pages - which itself was a notable page at the time (which Bob Allison would remind you of constantly on his site in case you forgot). Looking at this, it brings up (among other nice tidbits) some old "must see" starting places:
 * Cool Site of the Day (previously mentioned here, but definitely belongs here, too)
 * NCSA's What's New
 * Yahoo!'s What's New
 * What's Cool From Netscape (edited by the Netscape What's Cool team)