There's revivals of a few of the services here. Off the top of my head, myspace has spacehey which is moderately popular. AIM and MSN messengers have revivals out there but I forget the details. Neocities certainly isn't geocities but it has a similar vibe and name. They mention winamps resurrections, and at least in the unix world we have a few players compatible with the skins (which lets be honest here, why else would you want to use winamp today). Pebble came back recently. Dial up exists as well, but is mostly relegated to the extremely rural and will probably die out when satelite internet like starlink gets more popular. And of course, homepages never died for anyone moderately interested in computers
Minidisk is technically dead, but it still occasionally gets new releases, particularly from the vaporwave/y2k scene and needlejuice (they have Lemon Demon and the Friday night Funkin' soundtrack)
ElCapitanMarkla 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I the Tamagotchi deserves a place on here.
Did anything really kill it? It was kind of just a fad in the late 90s and its still around, not as popular as its fad stages but still reasonably popular. We just got back from Japan last week, there is a newly opened "Tamagotchi Factory" shop which was packed. The kids each picked up one of the latest versions and have been playing with them every day.
mghackerlady 16 minutes ago [-]
I can attest to them still existing, I collect them :) they're far more popular in Japan but in the states they limp along on nostalgia with re-issues of the older models and the occasional localisation of japanese ones
prmoustache 2 hours ago [-]
I saw some brand new tamagotchis in the toy alley of a supermarket while looking for a gift as recently as a few weeks ago.
People may be not crazy about it as they used to but they are definitely still a thing.
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
And the concept is still alive and well. My kids each got a Bitzee for Christmas which is basically the same thing.
andypiper 1 hours ago [-]
Hobbycraft in the local retail park has them by the tills. Definitely still around.
p4bl0 2 hours ago [-]
This is missing so much things that immediately comes to my mind (such as Voilà, Caramail, Multimania, Mygale, Radio.Blog.Club, Skyblog, Motion Twin's Flash games, etc.). I think those and many others are too local in the real world to be of any significance for a mostly US-centric history (my pov is based in France). Still, this brought up a lot of memories!
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
thnx for the feedback, will be adding them too.
brk 43 minutes ago [-]
Cuecat? Though I'm not sure if that ever really got big enough to warrant a spot, but it was a thing for a hot minute.
HomeRF - The wifi contender that was supposed to unify wireless networks across multiple device types.
Tivo - technically still around, but pretty much a zombie version of their former selves. (Maybe make an "I'm not dead yet!" section).
Gateway 2000 PCs -Their support line had a DJ, and they were everywhere until all of a sudden they were nowhere.
Optical Drives
Zip Drives - 100MB on a floppy! OMFG!!!11
Slashdot - Digg and Reddit's funky uncle.
zorked 38 minutes ago [-]
Interesting Cuecat story: LibraryThing bought a massive stock of Cuecats and, 20 years later, they still sell them, repurposed to scan ISBNs from books for cataloging purposes: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/CueCat_Guide
chordbug 3 hours ago [-]
Is the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
a57721 3 hours ago [-]
The text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too. (Edit: I mean "what people said" sections.)
I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.
It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.
bozdemir 33 minutes ago [-]
those are there for the placeholder purposes, I am currently removing and substuting them with real user feedbacks, thank you for the feedback, thank you for taking time to share it.
Scaevolus 3 hours ago [-]
Pangram rates it as 100% AI generated.
Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!
pxoe 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe there can be some kinda suggestion box and a voting system for suggestions or existing things? Like an open suggestion box, where people could submit potential entries and vote on whether they belong there and are dead or not. And for existing entries, to vote on whether something is truly dead or not, like 'yep, this is dead', or 'nope, this is still alive' (some things may be less popular, but that's not them being dead/actually completely discontinued and defunct). Not necessarily for ranking or putting it together into one score, but perhaps just showing a number of how many people think either way about something
pxoe 2 hours ago [-]
also, 'Coming up in the graveyard' makes it sound like something's gonna arrive here like it's newly dead, like it's about to be shutdown with a deadline, when it's just anniversaries, which really should be clearer at the top of that box
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
same, added to the roadmap, thank you.
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
this is a great suggestion, added to the roadmap.
Jtarii 3 hours ago [-]
Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed.
My thought is that this is interesting, but very narrowly scoped. I thought the list would be, um, longer. By a lot. This feels like talking about all of the deaths in pre-Enlightenment Europe and coming up with a list of seven names.
nottorp 1 hours ago [-]
The top of the page starts great, but then it goes to grey on grey on the item descriptions for that low contrast Apple like feeling.
Firefox/mac os, dark mode on.
Edit: no, dark/light doesn't seem to matter.
Edit 2: Time to go on a tangent.
I opened the site experimentally on my oled phone and while the grey on grey is still too low contrast, it's significantly more readable than on either my desktop or laptop monitor.
Is all this grey on grey fad a consequence of "designers" switching to 4k oleds even on the desktop?
bozdemir 48 minutes ago [-]
I was trying to capture the essence of the dead/grave concept, that's why I chose that type of pallet, I am really open to suggestios, what can I do better, what would you recommend? thnx for the taking the time, appreciate it so much.
nottorp 23 minutes ago [-]
Well I asked an "AI" and it pointed me to a bunch of accessibility guidelines including how to pick pairs of colours that are contrasting enough.
I'm no designer so that's where I'd start at :)
sinqlo 1 hours ago [-]
This is a fascinating project. I’ve noticed a major shift in how we handle digital assets—we moved from hard-coded absolute paths to 'permalinks,' yet the 'perma' part of that word is increasingly a lie. I’m curious, how do you handle the archival of assets that were originally hosted behind auth-walls or CDNs that have since changed their CORS policies?
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
I use .md files for the content, and generate static html files with a python script, soon I ll open source the engine behind to github, thank you for the positive comment.
mlok 3 hours ago [-]
I love the small web, and this is a nice project. But I won't remember to come back to it. It would be nice to have it pop up in my Mastodon or Lemmy (or Insta, or FB...) for each new addition.
Use the new web to bring people back to the old web :)
(Or a newsletter ? RSS ?)
Thank you for the "dark mode", like the old days. 2 annoyances though :
- the flashing bright yellow banner is painful to the eyes
- and the fonts are very small on a phone screen — although a 300x zoom "fixed" this.
specproc 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think the banner is painful, it just needs to be balanced by other graphical elements. It can offset by liberal use of <blink> throughout the text, or by a few tasteful gifs.
bozdemir 3 hours ago [-]
thank you for taking the time and giving feedback, i will fix them in no time.
ramblin_ray 2 hours ago [-]
LOVE this! I also love how concise and readable it is...
Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this:
would be a very good addition, thnx for the suggestion, added to road map.
mrweasel 1 hours ago [-]
mp3.com should really be listed under "media & music". So much amazing music and creativity was lost when the site closed. You can apparently dig out a massive zip file or something from archive.org, but last I tried it was almost impossible to navigate.
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
will be added soon.
dainank 2 hours ago [-]
> eBay bought it in 2005 for 2.6 billion dollars. Nobody really understood why eBay wanted it. Then Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars.
Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!
asimovDev 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for reminding me about RealPlayer. I remember playing flash games on it I had on a USB drive. Felt like a hacker when I downloaded them from a website and played them locally instead of having to be connected to the internet to play them :)
sgbeal 4 hours ago [-]
That big flashing yellow bar near the top makes the page _literally impossible_ for me to read. Human eyes are built to follow the fastest/flashiest thing around, and that bar takes the provierbial cake in terms of eyeball distraction.
mlok 4 hours ago [-]
I agree. Painful. (Especially on a "dark mode" website)
bozdemir 3 hours ago [-]
will fix, ty for the feedback
rovr138 57 minutes ago [-]
ICQ being first hurts
Thanks to people I met there, I started tinkering more with computers. I had a lot of fun there when everyone else went to sleep.
> "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed
Be around me when I get a text... I have gotten some really wild looks when people recognize it. It's a bit of wtf which shifts to woah when it clicks in their head.
Fun chat with CEO last week
...now, the typewriter when you turned on the keyboard sound. Maybe that has to do with why I like mechanical keyboards.
ChoGGi 48 minutes ago [-]
37292769
Why is that stuck in my brain?
rovr138 43 minutes ago [-]
no QR codes back then
It was just another phone number you had to know.
Edd314159 2 hours ago [-]
Is there anything out there that is the opposite of this? Like a directory of old things that are, against all odds, still alive
RGamma 5 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
yaky 16 minutes ago [-]
Jabber / XMPP is still around and is pretty good for self-hosting a messenger.
Email, now with multiple validations and verifications.
Gopher protocol has a niche community (probably overlapping with newer Gemini).
Doom, still played and modded, and now a semi-meme benchmark for low-spec hardware.
Countless *nix tools that originated decades ago and evolved.
I would suggest slackware as a long lived software project too
kaon_2 4 hours ago [-]
Amazing to read through the list. I had no idea about Orkut. To kill an application with 300m users seems insane.
Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.
disruptiveink 3 hours ago [-]
Killed for Skype, which was already declining by that time. Microsoft was keen on unifying their IM platforms, but failed to realise that unless the migration path is incredibly smooth, people just won't do it. And the value of any chat service is that the people you want to talk to are on there. Many people didn't bother migrating from MSN to Skype and that was the end of it.
The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.
Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.
Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
sev_verso 4 hours ago [-]
I was still using Skype to talk with my parents when they pulled the plug on it, too. Obviously (and unlucky for Microsoft), that conversation never moved to Teams. Curious how many users they lost with that move.
fazgha 2 hours ago [-]
Didn't know why, I jumped to check "Google Reader".. Still missing it to that day.
davidcollantes 2 hours ago [-]
Where would Prodigy, CompuServ, eWorld, MSN, and the like would fit in? Together with AOL?
bozdemir 1 hours ago [-]
will be adding them too, thnx for the feedback.
Lerc 1 hours ago [-]
Download.com
flexagoon 3 hours ago [-]
Why are "personal homepages" listed as dead? Sure, they're not as ubiquitous as they used to be, but almost every tech-adjacent person I know has one. Webrings and guestbooks are also very much still a thing. I'd say they are far from dead.
myself248 2 hours ago [-]
They used to be part of your ISP. You got a usenet server, and a mail server and a web server with a certain amount of space, just as part of signing up.
This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.
malfist 2 hours ago [-]
Did they? I've been around for ages (I know the dial up tone by heart). My early ISPs at best offered a mailbox (not a mail server), no web server, Usenet was extra.
And few people used the ISP mailbox because you couldn't take it with you when you left. Hell, I got my gmail during the invite only era
bozdemir 3 hours ago [-]
I guess mainly because of insta, facebook and other social media platforms, but I am a fan of old days. But our numbers are pretty limited compared to the mass.
flexagoon 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but I think it's just that internet is now used by much more non—tech-savvy people, not because people are switching from having a personal homepage to social media. The ones who know how to create a personal site still usually have one. Almost every post you see on HN is from someone's personal website.
sublinear 3 hours ago [-]
Of the people I know in tech roles, there are far more who have no online presence at all.
Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I think that's what they mean.
us-merul 3 hours ago [-]
Awesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
bozdemir 46 minutes ago [-]
thank you.
andypiper 1 hours ago [-]
Needs Twitter on there.
bozdemir 46 minutes ago [-]
yea very good catch, also might be a good to add categories like "murdered", especially fits to the case of twitter :)
hugobeey 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting Tamagoshi story.
I didn't realize how addictive the "keep them alive" narrative was.
No wonder streaks work so well nowadays.
There is a lot to learn from the past.
blae 4 hours ago [-]
MiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
d-lowl 4 hours ago [-]
Not only I guess. I remember buying a minidisk instead of miniCD __by accident__ in the '00s in Russia. That was literally the only time I saw one in person.
jbjbjbjb 3 hours ago [-]
My parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too.
Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
darkwater 3 hours ago [-]
ICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
The trust is dead, though. Not by all, but not by none either.
3 hours ago [-]
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
Was looking for MapQuest. Does it live still?
shahabebrahimi 2 hours ago [-]
This brought a lot of memories to me. Good job.
jaspervanderee 4 hours ago [-]
I like this project! Would be great if you could add their logos for sentimental value.
bozdemir 4 hours ago [-]
added to the roadmap, ty for the suggestion.
aledevv 3 hours ago [-]
I added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.
bjord 1 hours ago [-]
it's missing google buzz
peterpommes 2 hours ago [-]
How much I miss Path…
nurettin 1 hours ago [-]
This is hallucinated
Symbian OS
1998 - 2014
nokia ran the world on it. then the iphone came out. nokia kept shipping symbian phones for 6 more years out of denial. eventually everybody noticed.
----
No, Microsoft bought Nokia phone division, killed the brand and the OS (they published two updates called Anna and Bella and bricked my N8), published Lumia, some guy kept saying "devs devs devs" but nobody bought it.
There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
DimitriBouriez 4 hours ago [-]
Skype is missing?
bozdemir 4 hours ago [-]
will be added soon :) yea that is a major find.
cookiengineer 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty much every text is slop-generated.
I like the idea, not what OP has done with it.
Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time.
Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.
bozdemir 18 minutes ago [-]
I will be adding the details soon, especially screenshots, thanks for the feedback. Since english is not my mother tongue, had to cheat a bit.
malfist 2 hours ago [-]
Ai slop with the "I model myself after the AI greats" and most everything except the into is in lowercase
Minidisk is technically dead, but it still occasionally gets new releases, particularly from the vaporwave/y2k scene and needlejuice (they have Lemon Demon and the Friday night Funkin' soundtrack)
Did anything really kill it? It was kind of just a fad in the late 90s and its still around, not as popular as its fad stages but still reasonably popular. We just got back from Japan last week, there is a newly opened "Tamagotchi Factory" shop which was packed. The kids each picked up one of the latest versions and have been playing with them every day.
People may be not crazy about it as they used to but they are definitely still a thing.
HomeRF - The wifi contender that was supposed to unify wireless networks across multiple device types.
Tivo - technically still around, but pretty much a zombie version of their former selves. (Maybe make an "I'm not dead yet!" section).
Gateway 2000 PCs -Their support line had a DJ, and they were everywhere until all of a sudden they were nowhere.
Optical Drives
Zip Drives - 100MB on a floppy! OMFG!!!11
Slashdot - Digg and Reddit's funky uncle.
I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.
It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.
Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059
Firefox/mac os, dark mode on.
Edit: no, dark/light doesn't seem to matter.
Edit 2: Time to go on a tangent.
I opened the site experimentally on my oled phone and while the grey on grey is still too low contrast, it's significantly more readable than on either my desktop or laptop monitor.
Is all this grey on grey fad a consequence of "designers" switching to 4k oleds even on the desktop?
I'm no designer so that's where I'd start at :)
Use the new web to bring people back to the old web :)
(Or a newsletter ? RSS ?)
Thank you for the "dark mode", like the old days. 2 annoyances though :
- the flashing bright yellow banner is painful to the eyes
- and the fonts are very small on a phone screen — although a 300x zoom "fixed" this.
Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this:
https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/space-jam/
Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!
Thanks to people I met there, I started tinkering more with computers. I had a lot of fun there when everyone else went to sleep.
> "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed
Be around me when I get a text... I have gotten some really wild looks when people recognize it. It's a bit of wtf which shifts to woah when it clicks in their head.
Fun chat with CEO last week
...now, the typewriter when you turned on the keyboard sound. Maybe that has to do with why I like mechanical keyboards.
Why is that stuck in my brain?
It was just another phone number you had to know.
Email, now with multiple validations and verifications.
Gopher protocol has a niche community (probably overlapping with newer Gemini).
Doom, still played and modded, and now a semi-meme benchmark for low-spec hardware.
Countless *nix tools that originated decades ago and evolved.
Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.
The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.
Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.
Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.
And few people used the ISP mailbox because you couldn't take it with you when you left. Hell, I got my gmail during the invite only era
Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I think that's what they mean.
I didn't realize how addictive the "keep them alive" narrative was.
No wonder streaks work so well nowadays.
There is a lot to learn from the past.
Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
----
No, Microsoft bought Nokia phone division, killed the brand and the OS (they published two updates called Anna and Bella and bricked my N8), published Lumia, some guy kept saying "devs devs devs" but nobody bought it.
Fsck microslop.
There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
I like the idea, not what OP has done with it.
Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time.
Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.