#internet-history — Public Fediverse posts

Ah, the "England Runestones" — because nothing screams cutting-edge history like cryptic internet permissions and a dead link quest 🔍. Meanwhile, historians are busy deciphering the runes of your browser's user agent 🖥️. Respect the robots, or they'll leak your browsing history to the bards of yore 📜🤖.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_runestones #EnglandRunestones #InternetHistory #CrypticPermissions #BrowserUserAgent #RespectTheRobots #HackerNews #ngated

So, you're telling me I can snag a 90s-style .city.state.us domain for free? 🤣 Just what I always wanted — a relic from the internet's yesteryears! 🚀 Why not throw in a free dial-up modem while we're at it? 📞💾
https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/ #90sNostalgia #FreeDomain #InternetHistory #DialUpModem #RetroTech #HackerNews #ngated

Can't believe someone asked @hankgreen "Whats a flicker?" in reference to Flickr, the photo sharing website, and then he went on to explain this history of Flickr. 😅

If you thought having to explain a fax machine or a dial up modem made you feel old, imagine having to explain what a website was from 2004 (yet is still running today).

That said, hopefully its not too long before we have to answer "Whats a facebook?"

#Flickr #Internet #InternetHistory #HankGreen

Internet Archive Blog: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’. “On the occasion of the Internet Archive’s 30th anniversary, we’re opening the internet’s yearbook to celebrate the sites, services & scrappy experiments that helped shape the web as we know it. From class leaders like Center for Democracy and Technology to cultural icons like The Onion […]

I’m giving @tg’s Current a solid go to switch the way I read my 50ish RSS feeds from “get unread count to 0” to “does this interest me now, or at least until it expires its currency”.

After a short (<30 minutes) effort to bring my imported feeds from @NetNewsWire to a state that reflected what I wanted to move ahead with unread, it really does feel less demanding. I like it and will see if I can persist; it does require something of a change in mindset.

Also, if you haven’t read Terry’s essay The Boring Internet, I recommend it highly - https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet

#VeryOnline #rss #internethistory #culture

#FunFact: our web presence has a very long tradition by #InternetHistory standards.

The first version was a subpage on the Austrian Institute for Eastern and Southeastern Europe (OSI) website in 2002: http://www.osi.ac.at (now only available on #ArchiveOrg).

Almost 20 years ago, we created our own domain: https://www.ministerratsprotokolle.at/. It is still active today. Of course, the first address these days is https://mrp.oeaw.ac.at/

#histodons #History #DH #digitalHumanities #InternetCulture #websites

What a great conversation. I love her story about writing an "algorhyme to go with the algorithm."

Mother of the Internet: A Conversation with Radia Perlman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZg82VyrUeo

#internetHistory

Ask.com shut down May 1, 2026, ending its search service after 25 years under IAC and closing a platform known for natural-language queries via Jeeves 🤖

🔗 https://www.engadget.com/2163129/ask-com-has-shut-down-marking-official-farewell-to-internet-favorite-butler/

#TechNews #AskCom #Ask #SearchEngines #IAC #InternetHistory #AI #Privacy #FOSS #OpenWeb #BigTech #Data #Transparency #DigitalRights #Tech #Innovation

Ask.com and Jeeves Shut Down After 30 Years of Service

📰 Original title: It's Goodbye Time for Jeeves and Ask.com

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/ask-com-and-jeeves-shut-down-after-30-years-of-service/?redirpost=75d3ac60-3cf7-4aa1-9544-3d40f04949ec&utm_source=mastodon_world&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=yOAxulYDJiR0231eonVH5fVZzdi42_IDdV5yvxQXYkQ

#technology #ask.com #jeevesshutdown #internethistory

Ask.com Abandons Search Operations After Three Decades

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, stops search operations on May 1, 2026. IAC moves to other business areas. Millions of users affected.

#AskCom, #SearchEngine, #InternetHistory, #IAC, #TechNews

https://newsletter.tf/ask-com-search-ends-may-1-2026/

Ask.com search engine has officially closed down on May 1, 2026. This marks the end of a 25-year run for the search service.

#AskCom, #SearchEngine, #InternetHistory, #IAC, #TechNews
https://newsletter.tf/ask-com-search-ends-may-1-2026/

This morning I was thinking fondly of the Telegarden and mourning the old weird Internet that created, nurtured, and cherished such things. The garden was created by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana at the University of Southern California and went online over the WWW in June 1995.

It was an actual garden equipped with a robot arm that people could control remotely over the Internet. You could look around, water actual plants, and eventually earn the right to plant a seed, assume responsibility for its care, and watch it sprout and grow.

1/2

#Telegarden #WWW #InternetHistory #USC #UniversityOfSouthernCalifornia #KenGoldberg #JosephSantarromana #OldWeirdInternet

https://web.archive.org/web/20190302143637/http://queue.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/garden/Ars/

Ask.com shuts down after nearly 30 years, taking Jeeves with it

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2026/05/ask-com-shutdown/

For the last 25 years, Barren Realms Elite (BRE) has been frozen in amber, with the same ANSI title screen.

But it was preceded by _lots_ of other designs from 1992-97.

I put together a gallery of 14 of these forgotten screens:

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2026/05/02/the-many-ansi-title-screens-of-barren-realms-elite/

I hope you'll enjoy revisiting the changing looks of a classic BBS door game.

#bbs #retrocomputing #retrogaming #InternetHistory #history #vintagecomputing #ansiart #ansi #textmode

Mashable: Ask.com shuts down after 30 years. “Ask.com, originally founded as the Y2K stalwart Ask Jeeves, is officially dead. ‘As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,’ the homepage now reads.”

Tubefilter: ‘The Guild’ was an iconic web series. Nearly 20 years later, Felicia Day is reviving it as a movie.. “19 years ago (has it really been that long?), Felicia Day created and starred in a show that poked fun at the gameplay and interpersonal dynamics of World of Warcraft clans…. Flash forward to 2026, and the same cultural climate that propelled The Guild to the forefront of the […]

Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things

https://rip.so

#HackerNews #RipSo #DeadInternet #Graveyard #DigitalArtifacts #InternetHistory #OnlineMemories

404 Media: Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated. “Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled ‘The Impact of AI-Generated […]

Mashable: What happened to Omegle? The rise and fall of the internet’s favorite stranger danger . “In 2009, Omegle launched with a simple premise: connect strangers from around the world one-on-one via text or video chat. The pairing was random, and anyone with internet access could join for free, no account required…. But not everyone came to Omegle with good intentions. After it shut down […]

I have this funny habit of holding onto my internet history - I just love knowing exactly when I created my accounts across the web. While digging through some old emails today, I found an absolute gem.

Here is my original registration email for my vivaldi.net account, dated January 30, 2015. I looked it up, and Vivaldi's very first Technical Preview was released to the public on January 27, 2015. I signed up literally three days after they launched!

It is crazy to think I have been with them for over 11 years now. Watching Vivaldi grow from that very first preview build into the powerhouse it is today has been such a cool ride. Proud to be a Day One user!

#VivaldiBrowser #TechNostalgia #InternetHistory #DayOneUser #BrowserWars #Fediverse #Blog #Vivaldi #History

Sometimes it is fun to do a manual audit of internet history. I just visited http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and paused for a minute. It is literally the first website in the world.

The technical legacy of CERN is mind-blowing. They did not just smash particles! They gave us HTML, the WWW, and a strong culture of digital privacy. @protonprivacy for example, was founded by scientists who worked at CERN (it originally ran on protonmail.ch), and today it is one of the best tools we have to push back against Big Tech.

But then I got curious and went down a WHOIS rabbit hole. The registry shows cern.ch was registered "before 1 January 1996". However, the historically recognized first domain ever, symbolics.com, was registered on March 15, 1985.

I had a brief moment of cognitive dissonance: how could the first domain be six years older than the first website? Then it clicked. DNS and WWW are fundamentally different protocols. The DNS was already routing emails and networks long before Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks.

To take it a step further, the same Tim Berners-Lee did not just invent the Web - he went on to found the W3C to keep it open and standardized, a mission that still continues today.

First domain != first website. It is basic technical logic, but connecting the dots manually gives that satisfying feeling of closing a mental background process.

#WebHistory #CERN #DNS #W3C #TechPhilosophy #InternetHistory #Proton #InfoSec #TechAudit #Blog #Privacy #History #Fediverse

Why a Locked Floppy Disk Could Be Safer Than a Modern Network

Dear Cherubs, in the 1990s, office security had the elegance of a locked drawer and the threat model of a very determined coat thief. Floppy disks were the workhorses of the era, and Britannica notes they were popular from the 1970s until the late 1990s, made of flexible plastic coated with magnetic material. Before the internet became an everyday business utility, many workplaces were still mostly offline; Pew Research found that in 1995 only 14% of U.S. adults had internet access, and 42% had never heard of it.

THE LOCKED-BOX LOGIC

If your payroll files, drafts, and backups lived on removable media, the cleanest security move was physical control. Put the disks in a cabinet, lock the cabinet, and hope nobody on the third floor had a master key and a curious streak. It was a blunt system, but it worked because access was local, slow, and obvious. If someone needed a copy, they usually had to walk over, ask, sign something, and maybe endure a suspicious look from whoever guarded the supply room.

That is the part people forget when they romanticize the old days. The security was not magical; the attack surface was just tiny. To steal the data, someone usually had to be in the building, or at least within arm’s reach of the media. Annoyingly low-tech, yes. Also annoyingly effective.

MODERN SECURITY, NEW PROBLEMS

Once files moved onto networks and cloud systems, the game changed. NIST defines intrusion detection as monitoring events in a system or network for signs of possible incidents, and says intrusion prevention systems can also try to stop them. CISA says firewalls shield computers and networks from malicious or unnecessary traffic, while NIST says cryptography is used to protect sensitive digitized information during transmission and while in storage. In other words: the modern office traded one locked box for a whole stack of digital locks, alarms, and panic buttons.

Of course, the modern setup has its own virtues. Data can be backed up automatically, shared instantly, and protected with layered controls that the floppy-disk era never needed. NIST’s storage-encryption guidance still says organizations should physically secure devices and removable media, which is a polite way of saying: the box still matters, even when the box now lives in a server rack. Security did not become less important; it became more complicated, which is basically the same thing with extra meetings.

So yes, a locked plastic box full of floppies could be safer than a badly configured internet-facing system. But that is not because the past was wiser. It is because the past had fewer doors, fewer windows, and fewer strangers trying every handle on the planet at once. Security has always been a trade-off between convenience and control; we just used to do the math with keys instead of passwords.

Sources:
Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/technology/floppy-disk
Pew Research Center — https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/part-1-how-the-internet-has-woven-itself-into-american-life/
NIST SP 800-94 — https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/94/final
CISA firewalls — https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/understanding-firewalls-home-and-small-office-use
NIST SP 800-175B Rev. 1 — https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/175/b/r1/final
NIST SP 800-111 — https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-111.pdf
Wikimedia Commons image page — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floppy_Disk_HD.jpg

In one hour, catch our interview with Cindy Cohn, EFF's outgoing Executive Director and prolific civil liberties attorney in the fight for digital rights.

Her first major case with the EFF, Bernstein v. United States, established the "right to code" and dismantled the USA's unconstitutional ban on encryption exports, paving the way for people to develop technologies like PGP and other strong encryption tools without having to register as an "arms dealer" and face government restrictions on publishing their ideas.

In her career since she's represented many historic cases: suing AT&T for secretly collaborating with the NSA (Hepting v. AT&T), Sony for installing malware DRM, a vote machine company abusing copyright law to silence criticism, the DVD Copy Control Association attacking freedom of speech, and many other fights against the NSA and for internet freedom.

Cohn has been with @eff for over 30 years, and succeeded Shari Steele to become EFF's Executive Director in 2015. Our interview discusses her works and legacy, the origins of the EFF, and the still-ongoing fight for privacy and digital liberties 💪

Premiering soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PFv0ki3nDc

#EFF #Interview #CindyCohn #DigitalRights #InternetHistory #Privacy #Security #Law

Web Informant: Moving day. “Back in 1993, I took the radical (at the time) step of requesting a new domain, strom.com. I say request because back then there wasn’t any actual ‘purchase’ – the internet was still relatively new to the general public, and all it took to become master of your domain was a simple email request, which was satisfied within minutes. Let us pause to remember and […]

The #rise and #fall of the world’s biggest #technology giants
Tech giants rise and fall, but #algorithms evolve too. Every company that once dominated the internet eventually faced decline, disruption, or complete disappearance.
#TechHistory #DigitalEvolution #TechGiants #Innovation #TechnologyTrends #InternetHistory #RiseAndFall #DigitalEmpires #BlogAnalytics #BloggerStats #WebTraffic #SEOInsights tech giants collapse, #technology evolution
https://juskosave.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-worlds-biggest.html

🐥 Peeps marshmallow chicks have been around for 73 years! 🤯

Starting all yellow, they expanded into a rainbow of Easter egg-like hues.

Their official website has been online for decades, but tracing its changing domains is like an Easter egg hunt through web history.

Take a "peep" into the colorful past of your favorite sites with the #WaybackMachine ➡️ https://web.archive.org

#Easter #Peeps #InternetHistory