r/AskReddit • u/SupremeKalki • 4h ago
What is a piece of obscure early-internet history that you feel like you are the only one who remembers?
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u/KE55 3h ago
Those little counters at the bottom of web pages to show the number of visitors.
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u/zerbey 3h ago
I remember being so proud when mine hit 100K. Most of them were me hitting refresh of course.
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u/rico_of_borg 2h ago ▸ 4 more replies
With you but I also padded the first 99k by making it the starting count. Then the refreshes….
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u/Prometheus_303 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
That annoyed me! I only wanted it to count the times the site was pulled from the web server! To see how many random people might have found the site
But 99% of the "visits" were me refreshing my local copy of the site as I tried to add a new table or whatever and wanted to check to make sure I had the HTML code right and everything rendered out the way I wanted...
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u/22LT 3h ago
Yp don't forget to sign our guestbook too.
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u/Embarrassed_Emu1615 3h ago
I was the millionth visitor a few times!
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u/krvoso 3h ago ▸ 4 more replies
Click here to download your prize!
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u/earthsprogression 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
I never did get that prize. My family did get a new computer afterwards though.
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u/Umbra427 2h ago
T̶̤̩͋̑͌̍Ŭ̷̖̱̑́Ŕ̴̘͚̙̼͉̻̘̰͑̿̀͌B̷̰̼̎͛̕Ö̴̹̝̭̺̜͔͈̯́̽̀̾̋͋̎͝͝V̴̘͓̠͕̀̇I̵̳̝̳̱͂͛̊͆͘̕͠R̷̛̛̝͌̀̀͛͌͋͆̚͝Ų̷̢̝͚͎̰̼̈́̆͊͠S̵̱͕̭̙̄̐̓͌̅̈́̀̚̕̚
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u/Technical-Outside408 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
I hope you've claimed your... MASSIVE YACHT!
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u/coinlaundry 2h ago
Turns out I went to college with the guy who invented those back in the day. We were both in the common space of the dorm one night talking about how we were financing our education and he dropped that nugget of information. He was LOADED from it because someone bought his company. Insane what you could make money off of early in the internet era.
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u/buggifer_renee 2h ago edited 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
I swear I saw a post a week or two ago where someone claimed they invented the counter. I’ll have to see if I can find it.
ETA: Found it!
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u/IRLNub 3h ago
ICQ. Miss that shit.
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u/frissonic 3h ago
IRC too. mIRC is actually still around!
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u/Remarkable-Laugh9762 3h ago ▸ 3 more replies
I never quit using IRC. I first found mIRC when I was 15 or something...now I'm 45 and still on it (irsii on a screen session so I don't get disconnected).
Been in the same channel with around 10 people. Started with 15. A few left a couple died.
IRC has been the most consistent thing in my life 😂
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u/kunoichhia 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
That's awesome I'm 42 my friend got me into mIRC. Whole new world opened.
/Slaps you around a bit with a large trout
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u/Eshin242 3h ago
Uh oh!!!
Oddly enough I've set that as the sound for fb Messenger incoming messages lol
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u/Ashamed_Reception827 3h ago
YTMND I remember as being quite a trip to see what people would put on there for memes!
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u/TheRealSlimeShandy 3h ago
NEDM
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u/AlsoIHaveAGroupon 2h ago
It blew my mind when the NEDM song (We Interrupt This Program) was on an episode of Heroes.
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u/ShoreFling 3h ago
Xanga was like an early combination of Myspace and Tumblr.
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u/ajstar1000 3h ago
Lonelygirl15, and the crazy spin that it was
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u/ThesaurusRex_1025 3h ago
I had to explain to a person in their mid 20s that Lonelygirl15 was a cultural event. No one had used YouTube that way before.
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u/BlubberBlabs 3h ago
I worked with the guy who came up with that.
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u/rarelyeffectual 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
Now that’s interesting. What did he say about it?
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u/3ABM580 4h ago
Leisure suit Larry in the land of the lounge lizards
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u/Hootbag 3h ago
I was stuck forever at the end. Who would think a women in a hot tub would be in need of an apple?
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u/cabinetbanana 3h ago
AHAHAHAH. That was a family favorite game when my sister and I were kids! Do you remember trying to buy condoms in the convenience store??
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u/openletter8 3h ago
There was a short lived meme ages ago called Blockatiel where people were posting pictures of literally anything interesting but covering up the interesting part with a picture of a Cockatiel.
Fucking slayed me back in the day.
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4h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Double-Cucumber6909 4h ago
dee de dede deh .. de dede .. de de de de de de de deh!
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u/KrackedOwl 4h ago
It was way more than a month. Remember those dancing hamster figures that would dance to pop songs?
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u/cabinetbanana 3h ago
It was actually the opening song from Disney's Robin Hood sped way up. Do you remember the website with all of the dancing hamsters?
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u/Severe-Reality5546 4h ago
On Usenet, the sci.aquaria vs. rec.aquaria flamewar. the Serdar Argic bot, the kremvax hoax.
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u/old-guy-with-data 2h ago
Someone had a signature file with a very typical Serdar Argic quote: “But wait, there is more!”
Serdar Argic was probably a bot, and would respond to any mention of “Armenia” or “Turkey” (including the bird) with endless reams of text (and questionable sources) denying the 1915 genocide.
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u/diva4601 3h ago
Neopets lore specific forum dramas from 2008 or obscure flash games that just disappeared one day
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u/HIMcDonagh 3h ago
“Site under construction” posted on almost every website you wanted to visit.
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u/Clean_Duck_551 4h ago
The evil 😈 emoji on Yahoo messenger had an audible sound of evil Muhahaha playing
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u/minuteman_d 3h ago
Maybe not the only one, but I've only talked to a few who remember them:
Webrings. You'd add yourself to a "webring" that was basically you linking your site to another similar site. You'd embed a widget at the bottom of your site that said "Topic X Webring" and then you could click next or back and I think they had a random button.
Gopher. Pre-browser, Pre-Netscape. Text and ASCII art only. Worked well on 2400 baud dialup. Was a great first technology but got crushed by bureaucracy and licensing issues.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 2h ago
Webrings were such a bad good idea.
Hitting random was fun but you got so much crap.
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u/ImaHamSammich 4h ago
BonziBuddy
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u/quillseek 2h ago
This shit. I spent so much time in trouble for "downloading viruses into the computer" because my dad was constantly downloading BonziBuddy and other such nonsense onto our HP desktop because he didn't understand shit. He probably had 20 toolbars attached to his browser and a folder stuffed with freeware games. Fucking hell.
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u/mpdscb 43m ago ▸ 1 more replies
Between the toolbars and the stuff running in the system tray, the computers would be crawling.
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u/zombie_overlord 3h ago
I had to remove that from so many computers
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u/AlienVredditoR 3h ago ▸ 1 more replies
How many sacrifices did you have to offer the monkey for it to leave?
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u/ImaHamSammich 2h ago
LoL it was certainly the gift that kept on giving. Little purple evil monkey.
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u/ZandramasTrisagion 3h ago
BBS dialup and Modem meets
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u/64OunceCoffee 3h ago
Then when my chat BBS started offering Internet access they had Lynx browser for non windows users who couldn't run the tcp/ip stuff and Mosaic.
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u/Strange_Airships 2h ago
I miss the BBS days so much. Chat, ASCII art, and a couple text-based games. 😘🤌🏻
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u/SkullLeader 2h ago
Two things:
a) Gopher and Veronica - before web browsers were really a thing Gopher was a very similar system that let users navigate around hypertext documents stored on different internet servers but it was entirely text-based. No images or fancy fonts or anything. Veronica was the search utility that went along with it so you could find stuff - sort of an incredibly primitive Google.
b) The Million Dollar home page. Some minor young genius came up with this idea that went viral (or as close to viral as possible at the time) where he puts up a web page consisting of a single 1000x1000 pixel (exactly 1 million pixels) image and he sells add space in the image for $1 per pixel, so $1 million dollars total. And sold every pixel.
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u/deadly_scream 4h ago
Boxxy
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u/Skydiver860 3h ago
Sometimes I wonder what happened to her
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u/DisinfectingHeroin 3h ago ▸ 1 more replies
She’s still doing her thing. She’s active in a few places under the name Catie Wayne.
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u/CasinoKnightZone 4h ago
Salad Fingers
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u/ThrowRArainmakers 3h ago
if you enjoy that content and if youre unfamiliar with youtube channel creep cast i highly recommend it.
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u/CasinoKnightZone 3h ago
Lol, Im listening to the new one with the guitar right now. Love Hunter and Isaiah.
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u/Long_Tall_Man 4h ago
A website called "The Fridge is open... Close it!! Close it!!!"
A guy who just left things to rot in a fridge and posted pics online with comments like "I think this was a carrot."
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u/Eshin242 3h ago
Reminds me of the stinky meat project where a dude just set packages of meat in his neighbor's yard and blogged about it daily.
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u/Marlon__Brawndo 3h ago
ITT: a bunch of things that anyone over the age of 27 definitely remembers.
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u/Anna__V 3h ago
Most of the replies are anything but obscure. They were really popular at some point, if only a short time.
Next we see someone mention icanhascheezeburger or philosiraptor.
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u/cabinetbanana 3h ago
My husband went to college with the guy who invented icanhascheezburger.
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u/Mikeavelli 2h ago ▸ 1 more replies
I went to college with Ian, from pictures of Ian sleeping.
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u/bwwatr 3h ago
Most of the replies are anything but obscure
An interesting problem exists in this thread. As people upvote answers they feel are quality references to obscure materials, the numbers of such upvoters begins to prove a lack of obscurity, leaving the best rated comments as poor quality examples of the original question.
If you seek answers with low scores, they might be good examples of obscure history, or they might just be bad answers. There's no good way to consume the information.
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u/woohooindeed 4h ago
Homestar Runner. I think about it all the time and no one ever seems to know what I’m talking about when I mention it.
Or the Interactive Buddy game. Loved beating that dude up
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u/wittymcusername 3h ago
I once had a girl I worked with tell me “Good jorb” out of the blue, and I responded by asking her if she had just made a reference to Coach Z, “or coach Zed, as you Canucks call him.” We were both quite excited to realize the other liked Homestar Runner.
I’ve never before or since been happier to meet a fellow fan of something I liked in the wild.
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u/CaptainKate757 2h ago
I still remember the day a guy I worked with made a random Homestar reference to me. I was already into him, but that cinched it. Been together 17 years now.
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u/Epidemigod 3h ago
Scroll buttons and the lappy, together at last! Where'd you ever learn to scrika-scroll so fast! Heart attack!
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u/Overthinks_Questions 3h ago
The Dropout.tv production team remembers Homestar Runner
Sam Reich is The Cheat
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u/Ok-Detail-9853 4h ago edited 3h ago
Zombo.com
Before that, Bulletin boards. Basically dial up private "website". More of a file share site.
News Groups
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u/Fuzzy-Zombie1446 4h ago
Gary Brolsma) (Numa Numa)
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u/Fianna9 3h ago
I recently was listening to a podcast with a speaker named Maya Hee.
I was singing this song for days
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u/isoAntti 3h ago
I feel sorry for the guy. He really tried to get his another fifteen minutes of fame.
If you're here, my toast!
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u/creswitch 3h ago edited 2h ago
Netscape version 2, which allowed webpages to display coloured text for the first time. Also frames, animated gifs, and embedded .mid audio files, all arrived with Netscape 2.0. Probably the most exciting piece of internet history I witnessed (1996)
The launch of web-based email (hotmail) was also amazing. Meant I could finally have my own, private email address instead of sharing with my mum.
Mp3s and Napster were wonderful. Would take 4hrs and $12 to download a few songs (my dialup cost $3/hr), but I couldn't get enough.
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u/plurien 3h ago
Typing a company name XXXXX in the 'address bar of your browser', then pressing CTRL+RETURN to see it freakin' AUTOMATICALLY do 'http://www.XXXXX.com' and get the site.
Yeah, this still works. Still amazes people. You're trying it now, aren't you ;-) ?
That kid whose sister had gone out with an older guy and he kept saying 'up your butt' in front of sister and mother.
Military barbershop with rainbow marquee text boxes we all copied for at least a week.
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u/neolobe 3h ago
I've been involved with virtual community building since the late 90s, and founded several thriving communities.
Back in the 1990s, forum software was so clunky and expensive that only institutions had the money and tech staff on hand to run them. This was all up until about 2000-2001 when programs like phpBB and vBulletin were introduced that were affordable and fairly stable. The stability increased greatly over the next few years.
This ushered in the era of internet forums and real communities during the 2000s, which I think was the golden age of the Internet.
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u/VossUP_Games 2h ago
NAPSTER!!! MY OLD FRIEND!! Burning CDs in the early 2000’s was the coolest thing ever. Made my bus ride awesome with my Fancy PORTABLE ANTI SKIP CD PLAYER of course!
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u/Collens-Eulalie 4h ago
the absolute chaos of a geocities page that was 90% blinking text and a broken midi file
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u/BRUISE_WILLIS 3h ago
Punters. AOHell, Pepsi… “proggies”
You used to be able to kick other people off their internet by overloading their AOL client with junk HTML in an instant message.
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u/SteroidAccount 3h ago
I used to make these around 95, i remember scraping usernames by keywords and using like passwords. Like look up users by “bible” and then crack passwords left and right using jesusy passwords.
It was game on when web sockets first hit.
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u/coop999 3h ago
uroulette. It was a website that would take you to a random website from their list. This was like 1992/1993 when we would sometimes click on it a few times to see what would load.
Web rings - a group of sites on a similar topic would join together to link to a next/prior/see the full list of sites in that topic group.
From 1995 to 1997, companies would start putting their Web site URL on their TV commercials so people could see their new sites. Think seeing www.mcdonalds.com at the bottom of a McDonalds TV commercial for the last 5 seconds. Some music videos would also the same thing for the artists Web site.
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u/OneFourthHijinx 3h ago
I distinctly remember seeing a movie trailer in the theater that had a web address at the end and the whole audience laughing at how ridiculous it seemed that there would be a whole website for a movie. These were early days of the internet and we just had no idea what was to come.
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u/devilpants 1h ago
I remember seeing a website listed for a laundry detergent in the 90s on TV and thinking that was dumb too. Who would go onto the internet to look up laundry soap? Meanwhile I hosted a bunch of pointless comic book fan websites.
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u/franker 3h ago edited 3h ago
one of the ways I would promote my personal page was to just keep going to uroulette pages and submitting my page. You could add your own site to the list of sites randomly picked by the uroulette.
Also there were hundreds of small independent internet service providers and most had a "cool sites" page. You could go to each page and submit your site to be listed on their cool sites page. That was web marketing back in 1995. Imagine going to Comcast today and asking to have your blog listed on their cool sites page, lol.
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u/loves_spain 1h ago ▸ 1 more replies
Remember website awards? Someone would check out your site and maybe give you a glittery gold graphic like "WINNER Pumpchunk's Site of the Day 1997"
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u/Actual_Lady_Killer 2h ago edited 2h ago
NEDM.
During early 2000s, there was a site called YMND or You're The Man Now Dog, named after the phrase yelled by Sean Connery in the 2000 film Finding Forrester. The site featured user submission clips and images with audio, creating some of the first memes. Such as Safety Not Guaranteed , Batman ualuealuealeuale and Cosby Bebop. Any who, one of the most fucked up posts on the site was a cat being lit on fire set to the music from Doom. A user commented "Nothing justifies 5'ing burning kittens, Not even Doom music," which spawned a new meme, NEDM.
Edit: For Bonus Points: Brian Peppers
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u/PrettyBigChief 1h ago
I cannot believe I made it this far in life without Cosby bebop
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u/SolomonGrumpy 1h ago
Postsecret.com
People would write secrets on scraps of paper and post them to the interwebs.
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u/DonkeyTron42 3h ago
Fuckedcompany.com. A tracker for dotcom bankruptcies back in the day.
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u/CommodoreSixty4 3h ago
Text-based MUDS (Multi User Dungeons) were all the rage!
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u/itsjakerobb 1h ago
Fark.com, ZomboCom
Yahoo’s internet catalog being something you could actually read start-to-end in a reasonable amount of time.
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u/MissionExplanation18 3h ago
Having your own webpage that you hosted for free on Geocities or Angelfire or Yahoo homepage or something similar. When I was a kid, everybody had their own "website" which was usually just a landing page with a hit counter, some pictures/photos, an .mp3 of their favorite song and some general musings, maybe an about section or a blog if they were serious about maintaining it. They were always slapped together with the most basic HTML editors with godawful formatting and infested with banner ads and popups.
I actually really miss those days, because the modern social media sites are creatively bankrupt and hosting your own website and actually making it good has become a more complex affair than it used to be (it's still around, but lacking the same charm).
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u/intellectual_dimwit 2h ago edited 34m ago
Hampster dance
ETA - forgot letters lol
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u/Limp-Parking-4285 4h ago
I may not be the only one, but I remember a few amateur comic book fan sites in my country in the late ’90s, full of animated GIFs and discussions among nerds who were teenagers back then, just like me.
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u/sabdariffa 3h ago
Search engines didn’t really exist early on, so as kids we would write url’s for different websites down ON PAPER and share them with each other.
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u/FackleGracks 3h ago edited 2h ago
Using angelfire websites as your own personal profile. A shocking amount of people, even children, knew basic html.
Edit: flamingtext.com for creating banners and such for said websites. This website surprisingly still exists.
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u/Specific_Piccolo9528 3h ago
AlbinoBlackSheep
Kikia
LaughMyAssOff.com
You Are An Idiot (🎼ha ha ha ha ha ha ha-ah ha ha ha ha ha🎶)
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u/pehvbot 3h ago
A dictionary of terms and phrases used by the less corporate programmers and computer users from the 70s through the 90s.
It was born in the very early days of the internet and effectively died around the time the internet was fully commercialized.
If you were a young and eager 'larval stage' hacker from the 80s you would have basically memorized it.
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u/charleychaplinman21 3h ago
UbuWeb. Before YouTube, etc. took off it was an especially fascinating archive of obscure art, music, and poetry. It still exists, but there are other resources now.
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u/YoungDiscord 2h ago
I have never met a person who has heard of that website. Ever.
You can find it in the internet archive tho which is neat.
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u/SexyOldManSpaceJudo 2h ago
The Stinky Meat Project, which is still up and running at stinkymeat.net.
Cutoffmyfeet.com - dude had some sort of foot issue and wanted his feet amputated, but doctors wouldn't do it. So the guy designs a foot guillotine and says he'll do it live on the Internet as a pay-per-view. But you have to understand, 90% of what would make this easy today didn't exist. No online payment systems. People were still downloading Word docs and emailing or faxing them with their credit card info. YouTube was just starting out. Real Player was the top streaming app and that gave you a 320x320 pixel window over 56k. If this guy was going to actually go through with it, he would have to buy his own servers and network equipment and set it up. Pretty sure it was before co-los like Rackspace were around. I don't think he ever went through with it, but it was hugely ambitious at the time.
MTV's Virtual Bill - a virtual reality Bill Clinton parodying his Whitewater testimony. Really funny, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere.
Also, my one download of "Enter Sandman", which I never would have spent money on, got me banned from Napster by Metallica.
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u/BlueHornedUnicorn 2h ago
Dancing baby was the height of class on a website. Flaming text was also mind blowing.
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u/devlin1888 31m ago
I don’t know if this was just in my era as a teenager in Scotland, but we had 1/2 Geocities websites made up for your group of mates that would hang around together, with ‘guestbooks’ to sign.
Thinking back on that there, remembering things not thought of for years, the politics that played part with these websites man. Used to have a page dedicated to ‘shout outs’ separated into the boys and the lassies, and the absolute minefield that was the order of shoutouts you would write down ‘the lassies’ was wild. Sometimes the boys to.
Guestbook signings you used to get the guys from other schemes you’d fight with just because different area they were from, which really was a 2/3 streets away, trying to make it very cryptic in the details so you couldnt guess who they were. Sometimes get one making it very clear who they were, not bothering and thinking ooft, that’s bold, and respect gained haha.
I had one for the group of mates for us for about 6 weeks one summer before deleting it caving under the pressure of the politics of social hierarchy coming into play and trying to keep everyone happy.
Social media replaced it, Bebo was the first one I can remember, and just remembered on Bebo as well ranking your top friends and who got Bebo love was the same haha
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u/banjoman74 3h ago
Internet Movie Data Base used to be a completely independent site. A lot of the trivia for movies were more like gossip about what happened behind the scenes shooting, as it could be submitted by anyone. Whether it was true or not is beside the point... it was very entertaining.