Double click the lamp or press L anywhere on the page to switch the lamp on or off. While the lamp is on, press and hold for 2 seconds to overload the filament; keyboard users can hold Space. Refresh to repair a broken filament.

The internet I grew up on

Personal sites, forums, and a web that felt like somewhere you could stay.

2 min read0 views

The first website I loved was probably not a website. It was a forum.

I do not remember how I found it. That was normal then. You clicked a link on someone’s page, and it took you somewhere else. There was no feed deciding what you should see next.

I could name the sites, but the ones I remember are probably not the ones you remember. That is part of the point.

Rooms

The web felt like a place with rooms. Some rooms were busy. Some were empty. You could stay in one for an hour and leave without anyone asking you to subscribe.

I spent a lot of time on forums for things I did not own and games I did not play. I read arguments between strangers about topics I had never heard of. It was not useful. It was interesting, which is a different thing.

People had personal sites. Some were about a cat. Some were lists of links. One had not been updated since 2004. Nobody expected them to make money. They existed because someone wanted them to.

I remember a site that was just a list of fonts someone liked. No explanation, no ads, no way to contact the person. I bookmarked it and went back to it for years.

Blogs were like that too. You would find one through a link on another blog. The writing was uneven. The design was often bad. That was part of the charm. You were reading a person, not a publication.

The stream

At some point the web got better at keeping us. Feeds, recommendations, infinite scroll. Everything became a stream. The odd little pages are still there, but they are harder to find. The places that used to feel like rooms now feel like hallways.

The current web is better at almost everything. It is faster, it is easier, and it has almost everything I need. It just does not feel like a place I can get lost in.

I am not going to pretend the old web was perfect. It was slow, it was full of weird stuff, and it was not particularly accessible. I do not want to go back. I just miss the feeling of wandering.

Making this site is my small attempt to keep a room like that. It has no feed and no business model. I made it because I wanted it to exist. If you found it through a link on someone else’s page, that is even better.

The internet I grew up on was less finished. There was more room in it for people who did not know what they were doing. I liked that.