Cameron's World

http://www.cameronsworld.net/

by zeitg3ist • 11 years ago

249 63 11 years ago

cameronsworld.net

rayiner• 11 years ago

Still faster than Engadget's homepage.

smrtinsert2• 11 years ago

And easier to use than Facebook.

eljimmy• 11 years ago

I do miss the early days of the web. I remember transitioning from BBS'. It truly was the "Wild West" era of the Internet. Ahh, the nostalgia.

mhd2• 11 years ago

I also miss the default gray background pages and the original horizontal rule (apparently you can't get that old inset look anymore).

chrisco255• 11 years ago

You can achieve this with pseudo elements easy.

gadders• 11 years ago

Like the hidden Goatse hyperlinks on Slashdot?

bliti2• 11 years ago

Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly Go is without getting hate email for weeks...

hellofunk• 11 years ago

A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking, improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on HN in recent weeks).

kawsper• 11 years ago

Me too.

It felt like everyone and their dog had a website using websites like Geocities. In Denmark we had Subnet.dk and (lesser known) Whitehat.dk.

It seems like that culture is now gone, and people have went to social networks, which is more pulling content than pushing it I guess.

On the other hand it is easier to share content today, on Facebook, Reddit or Imgur but it feels different than visiting a random website and explore the universe of that domain.

fitzwatermellow• 11 years ago

Link to interview with Berlin-based designer Cameron Askin:

http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images...

hadeharian• 11 years ago

Be afraid.

harrylove• 11 years ago

If this was the internet of old I'd still be waiting for the first row of GIFs to load and my computer would grind to a halt after the fifth.

But I do miss it so.

sideproject• 11 years ago

Totally agree. This would have killed my computer back in the mid or late 90's!

I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome on my Mac (I do have a new Mac...).

We've come a long way. :)

mattdotc• 11 years ago

I was impressed how everything rendered without a glitch on Chrome

Well, to be fair, this is a modern website composed of artifacts from the Geocities archive. This page would be a beast if it were implemented with techniques of the era.

Looking at the source for the page, the author seems to be lazy loading the assets and then dynamically placing them in the page with CSS.

We've definitely come a long way.

Uptrenda• 11 years ago

So many broken links. It's a shame that more couldn't be saved.

rickdale• 11 years ago

I just had to imp my car. Did a quick google search read the first two steps and then bam I was hit with a screen taking over advertisement that took me 15-30secknds to get off of my screen. The first thing that I thought was, "damn the Internet sucks." And I was let referring to my connection.

feld3• 11 years ago

This is great :-) My friend made a similar site, but not quite as extravagant:

http://rainbowdivider.com

Every refresh is a new experience!

rcr• 11 years ago

Some friends of mine decided we're going to bring webrings back. This was my attempt: http://rcr.io/webring.htm

feld3• 11 years ago

I came up with an idea for a new webring which is some remote javascript you embed in your page and it's hosted on github and people do pull requests to add their website to a text file to join the webring

Want to start a new webring? Fork the project, alter slightly

smrtinsert2• 11 years ago

This is very well done.

usaphp• 11 years ago

My macbook got CPU throttling at 100% when I stayed at that page for around a minute :)

collyw• 11 years ago

Should have bought a PC.

aplkorex• 11 years ago

If I could only view this through my skinned IE 5... I never thought I'd be nostalgic for this, but I am.

vidarh• 11 years ago

Made me think of this: http://www.arngren.net/

It's a Norwegian technology/gadget retailer that was basically the Norwegian equivalent of what Radioshack used to be. Then it was sold to some entrepreneur back in 2000, promptly went bankrupt, and was bought back by the original founder. The design stems from the design of their huge paper catalogue back in the 80's.

ddmf2• 11 years ago

Which reminded me of http://www.lingscars.com/

teh_klev• 11 years ago

I had no idea she was still in business. Good for her, I thought she was brilliant on Dragon's Den.

bpicolo• 11 years ago

Scrolling down teeechnically nsfw.

amilr• 11 years ago

So great. Yahoo should not have been allowed to shutdown Geocities.

smonff• 11 years ago

It is beautiful. At least there wasn't any Flash and no corporate-jumbotroned-conventionnal-websites.

ourmandave• 11 years ago

It should have a message that tells you to downgrade your browser for the best experience.

leni5363• 11 years ago

You upgrade it to Catscape Navigator.

Catscape is the most advanced browser available.
Version 2.324.46948633454654564646

hitekker• 11 years ago

I can see eternity.

Nice work!

knappador• 11 years ago

Not two years ago I was having a conversation with an old friend that went approximately:

"Facebook, this whole internet thing, hasn't really..."

"...worked out"

"Yeah, this isn't what we thought it was gonna be. Let's just... "

"...turn it off"

There was a belief implicit in the idea of every human on Earth being connected. Many of the phenomenon that came about have made that belief look vulnerable to a certain cynicism, a cynicism about humanity, that we fear in each other, that we hold towards ourselves. A currency that bound us together face to face became fiat and then failed at scale. It is within the vacuum painted by this fear that the organizing effects of the old-world economy have been fallen back on, but I do not presently fear this cynicism, and I save my currency wherever I can earn it.

comrh• 11 years ago

Not enough tables in the HTML though.

Aaronontheweb• 11 years ago

But they did have plenty of frames though!

dogma1138• 11 years ago

So much win!

camworld• 11 years ago

This is not, I repeat, this is not my old CamWorld (pioneering blog) site from the late 1990s. :-)

bjz_• 11 years ago

I love internet archaeology. Contemporary Home Computing[0] has some great pages. I particularly like the one analysing the so-called 'Prof. Dr. Style'[1].

[0] http://contemporary-home-computing.org/ [1]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

htor• 11 years ago

I was expecting this to be David Cameron's new website. Was not disappointed!

cpncrunch• 11 years ago

I was expecting to see a story about some new colony that has no porn and lots of surveillance.

shaaaaawn• 11 years ago

I was recently trying to dig up the IDE's of the early internet publishing platforms like Geocities, Tripod, MySpace (1.0) to try and do a similar project. Could only find the archived pages/assets like this.

ZenoArrow• 11 years ago

IDE... I might be remembering this wrong, but weren't GeoCities sites coded offline and uploaded as static files?

Also... https://neocities.org/

jscholes• 11 years ago

Can you disable the automatic playback of the music, please? Screen reader users cannot hear a thing over it all. I know you're trying to create a tribute to the web of old, but this particular throwback is not one I think deserves a place.

davesque• 11 years ago

Wow...nostalgia. They should add a fake connection throttle to the site so all the GIFs take 1 minute to load and it would seem even more authentic.

chejazi• 11 years ago

So much cheese. My favorite:

IF YOU STUDY THE MATERIAL ON THIS WEBSITE YOU WILL HOPEFULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR PURPOSE HERE ON EARTH HAS BEEN.

leni5363• 11 years ago

Reminded me:

http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/

Warning: I think it plays sound, I have no speakers right now.

leni5363• 11 years ago

My favorite part is the little green sign:

Welcome to the INTERNET
ENJOY the RIDE

foobarian• 11 years ago

That just reminded me of Mahir[1] and his "Welcome to my home page... I kiss you!" fad. Good times...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040905074540/http://www.ikissyo...

MrBra3• 11 years ago

Funny how on first page right now there's also Bootstrap 4-alpha :)

mendelk• 11 years ago

Relevant: http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

MrBra3• 11 years ago

Haha!

MrBra3• 11 years ago

This for sure conveys a certain magic, I cannot quite explain how that happens honestly, but we have to recognize that the highly amateurish design makes for a more.. alive thing.

Hmmm, are we close to the next paradigm shift? :)

Perhaps there is a reason why after the perfectly smooth and metal-shining flying-saucers the next stage is usually biotechnologies..

digi_owl• 11 years ago

Now you got me thinking about a notion i have when i see photos of houses for sale. All of them show rooms to styled and pristine that my first thought is that nobody lives there.

Any place where a human lives (unless they are suffering from some kind of OCD or whatever) inevitably end up having things stacked in corners or strewn across surfaces in a semi-random fashion. You can almost trace a timeline from what is on top of what.

I wonder if designers end up stuck trying to reproduce Platonic ideals, thus making everything look sterile.

axx• 11 years ago

The truly amazing thing is, that I can visit that site from my phone without any lag or performance issues.

Welcome to the future!

Kiro• 11 years ago

So a lot of "new" stuff in the source (HTML5 doctype, "no-js" body class, apple-touch-icon, FB things etc). Is this site being updated still?

schoen• 11 years ago

If you like animated GIFs as art, you might enjoy Olia Lialina's work.

http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html (warning: page autoplays audio)

a3n• 11 years ago

Under construction gifs!

It's like finding an old TV show and watching it with my teenager. "Yeah, we used to think this was really cool."

barteklev• 11 years ago

Impressive. I hardly remember an old internet, but well, created a website at times when people used to use <marque> tag. :-) This site made me think about it. Probably we've lost something with this whole progress and knowledge how to design, maybe started overdoing it often? I don't know. Thanks.

ekanes• 11 years ago

My oldest site is 20 years old, haven't updated it in forever, but kinda fun it's still there! http://www.coolsig.com/

Cameron's World

Related Stories