“You are in a stone walled room, barren and barely lit by a small torch on a plain table in the centre of the room. A large oaken door on the west wall is slightly ajar. The odour of rotting vegetation is overpowering, and reminds you of the urgency of your mission--To have a great time in a dungeon! You have a gold key.” #internethistory #humour #zorklike #cry #goldkey #oldbookmarks http://www.yip.org/goldkey.html
It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies (but despite this, web design has achieved a harmony of form and function), Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, Google is born, and Netscape is going open source. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-1998/ #InternetHistory
So, $300/month gets you the honor of browsing Hitler's surname on a defunct browser? 
Meanwhile, the Help Center politely suggests you find a time machine to access their supported browsers. 
https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1944266466875826617 #HackerNews #Humor #InternetHistory #TechTrends #TimeTravel #HackerNews #ngated
November 2007— Mark Cuban pitches to #Facebook an API that extends past the Facebook domain. He describes what would eventually become Facebook's Open Graph and Graph API, the catalysts to the #CambridgeAnalytica scandal that would occur six years later.
For those of you who ever have to tell the tale of woe that was Google Reader being axed, let this cartoon guide your way.
(And nice to see ChatGPT still merrily hallucinating with the girl whose head is doing a full Exorcist turn.)
@internetarchive
I was in my late teens and early 20s when Disney was doing this... It confused me because of all the redirecting and I actually remember thinking that it could be dangerous... I wondered who go.com was and why I ended up there. Had no inkling that domain redirection (misdirection?) would become the privacy and security nightmare it is today.
Summer online in the late 90s? Disney hoped you’d start at Go․com.
It launched in 1998 as a bold web portal strategy to unify Disney’s online presence—ESPN, ABC, Disney—all under one digital roof. But starting in 2001, it was gradually stripped of services & branding. Now it's just directs to a page about the Disney Company.
Check out its short life with the #WaybackMachine
https://web.archive.org/web/20011116082714/http://go.com/
Remember the sound of dial-up? The ritual of burning a mix-CD? We've journeyed from a world of deliberate clicks to one of constant scrolling. But what did we lose in our quest for frictionless convenience?
My new long-read explores the 30-year evolution of our relationship with electronics, contrasting the 90s with today. It's a deep dive into the good (global connectivity, access to knowledge) and the bad (the mental health crisis, surveillance by design).
Is our modern digital life a dream fulfilled or a dilemma we can't escape? Read the full analysis here: https://medium.com/@patryktomkowski/the-dial-up-dream-and-the-digital-dilemma-charting-our-30-year-journey-with-technology-e8b5c0c7d301
As search engines in 2025 shift from providing links to (AI) answers — and all the angst that is causing web publishers — I thought I'd take a look at what search engines were like in 1998...one year before Google became popular. At that time search was seen as just one part of the portal experience. But little did AltaVista know, it wouldn't be the center of attention on @dannysullivan's Search Engine Watch for much longer. https://cybercultural.com/p/search-1998/ #InternetHistory #searchengines
Glen Jacob Culler (nacido el 7 de julio de 1927, fallecido el 3 de mayo de 2003) fue un profesor de EEUU de ingeniería eléctrica y un importante innovador temprano en el desarrollo de Internet con el Sistema en Línea Culler-Fried a mediados de los 60s
#retrocomputingmx #InternetHistory
2011—"For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy."
Fun bit of #InternetHistory.
Nicola Pellow: The Quiet Hero of the Web
At 21, while still a student, she built the first cross-platform browser, letting the web go global. Then she disappeared.
Who remembers her today? Almost no one.
I wrote my longest post since 2016 to honour her and the quiet women who shaped tech.
Ah, the noble pursuit of tracing the riveting saga of macOS icons, because clearly, nothing screams edge-of-your-seat excitement like pixelated fruit history 
. Meanwhile, the blog’s design choices channel the spirit of mid-2000s internet enthusiast sites—truly groundbreaking stuff. 
https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history #macOSIcons #PixelArt #DesignNostalgia #TechHumor #InternetHistory #HackerNews #ngated
Shoutout to the archivists and aggregators—the people who have the foresight to know when tech history is happening, so they round up all the relevant blog posts, news articles, and socials.
Y'all are the unsung heroes of the web. Understanding tech history means not making the same mistakes. Without our archivists and aggregators so much of that history would be lost to dead links and buried under #Google's SERP. Thank you.
I’ve managed to trace my website publishing history and relive a bunch of sites I made all the way back to 1995! You can read about this at:
https://blog.tribesmanjohn.au/2025/07/the-search-for-my-first-website/
I encourage all your indie web bloggers to do the same and let reply to this post with your article :)
Web archive is such a happy memory machine!
A lot of e-commerce sites were really *busy* in that late 90s-early aughts era — i.e. loads of links. Their style obviously influenced by portals, and the tabs (a la Amazon) were a big trend too. #InternetHistory
https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114788755359395779
This is a really great blog post about vintage personal web graphics (sets and linkware) I found via @DivergentRays 's excellent website while surfing the personal web yesterday.
https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/7047
I love how it talks about how integral middle-aged women with jobs outside of tech were to the growth and aesthetic of the earlier-internet. I appreciate the visibility and tribute given to these creators (and the whole blog is cool!) #smallwebjuly #internethistory #graphics #design
Great piece on the small/indie (original!) side of the internet, frustrations about most peoples' focus on the mainstream web, and why the 'good', REAL internet is still (and will always be) here underneath, and vibrant https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/20250603
"Well, we don’t feel threatened." That's the Olim brothers — founders of dot-com online music retailer, CDnow — talking about Amazon. It's from a book they published in 1998 entitled "The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet". At the start of '98, they were the leaders in online music retail. But in June 1998 [cue ominous music] Amazon branched out from books and added a Music tab to its fast growing e-commerce website... https://cybercultural.com/p/cdnow-amazon-1998/ #InternetHistory #CDnow #Amazon
Tubefilter: 20 years of YouTube: In 2013, PewDiePie’s Brofist shook up the creator world. “[Felix] Kjellberg’s YouTube career now spans a decade and a half, but 2013 truly was his big moment. He became the platform’s most-subscribed creator in August of that year, and his channel established the 15-million-subscriber club in November. Oh, and did I mention he reportedly grossed $4 […]
