people often say they can find this kind of thing via my employer, Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
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textfiles.com still looks like the 90s. It has stories, jokes, essays, and generally interesting stuff.
It's not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It's based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It's a beautiful thing.
4-ch.net (not to be confused with 4chan) is a 90s BBS that is still online and occasionally active. It's neat to see posts from the 90s still on the front page.
Sites that have old forums. There aren't many anymore, but ones I've seen that have been very helpful of late include car sites, a timeshare forum, and the Fantasy Grounds forum (my virtual tabletop of choice).
I'm sure there are others out there, but it's definitely more rare than it used to be. Is Something Awful still around?
https://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
(Not really mobile friendly, which holds true to the old school Internet)
Some examples that I remember are:
- The Berkshire Hathaway's website (https://berkshirehathaway.com/)
- The UNIX website (https://unix.org/version4/)
- Xorg Project website (https://www.x.org/wiki/)
- Marginalia Web Search (https://search.marginalia.nu/)
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) pages containing Standards (e.g.: https://www.w3.org/TR/controller-document/)
- Pd (Puredata) Project Website (https://puredata.info/)
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/An%20Introduction%20to%20Everything2 - massively interlinked information site
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ - robots and people comic
https://realultimatepower.net/ - ninjas
Has Real Ultimate Power actually changed at all/added new content? I was reading that in elementary.
Nope, exact same html.
I see YouTube videos linked, and I remember being on this site before YouTube existed. I don't think it has changed all that much, though.
Ebay
I imagine their source code is such an unmaintainable mess that it’s impossible to modernize
it was written in FORTRAN
Debian’s website….
hey, thats not fair, they redid it a few years back /s
No JavaScript sites on onionland
Extremely useful website for collectors of dead media formats (LD, D-VHS, HD-DVD, CED, VHD, etc.) Still has an old style interface with priority given to function and utility over styling. Also has a storefront where you can buy and sell discs.
TIL Timecube is no longer up. That was my go to site for what the internet used to be like.
aw man that site was like Dr Bronner's took some digital mushrooms
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html
I’m pretty sure spacejam.com showed that page up until the sequel supplanted it.
From a time when websites used <table>
or position: absolute;
to place elements on the screen. That website is just one big table.
I feel that right in the MySpace.
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.