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.
textfiles.com still looks like the 90s. It has stories, jokes, essays, and generally interesting stuff.
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.
Aw i miss when website tracking was only "xxxx users have visited this page" and it was just a simple counter that counted up.
Don't forget signing the guest list.
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!!!!
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.
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?
Ebay
I imagine their source code is such an unmaintainable mess that it’s impossible to modernize
it was written in FORTRAN
https://celeryman.alexmeub.com/
(Not really mobile friendly, which holds true to the old school Internet)
Debian’s website….
hey, thats not fair, they redid it a few years back /s
Some examples that I remember are:
I haven’t visited in a long time – but I can’t imagine Craigslist has changed much.
Craigslist is slightly cleaner looking that it used to be but the functionality and button placement is identical. I much prefer it to Facebook marketplace or OfferUp.
It has not, though there really isn't much posted there anymore. Facebook marketplace has replaced it for most stuff. :(
Kernel.org, home of the Linux kernel, hasn't changed much.
Kernel.org today:
Kernel.org in 1998:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980130085039/https://kernel.org/
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
Florida’s unemployment website
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
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.
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
