There are a lot of things that aren't dead exactly but are certainly at some small percentage of their peak popularity. Not Internet, but I like to give rollerblading/in-line skating as example. Yes, you may see someone doing it every few months but it used to be a pretty common activity at some point in the 90s. Bowling was very big at one point. There are still alleys but when was the last time you thought of being in a bowling league.
Yeah, I was thinking about pagers. They’re still used in some limited settings, like hospitals, but there are probably entire landfills composed entirely of old beepers.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
Slashdot is still online and updating. Some of us still use optical drives from time to time (especially those of us with an existing stock of M-Disc media for long-term archiving).
Gateway was purchased by Acer, so it’s not like they just disappeared. Not any more than DEC, SBC, or Studebaker anyway. They were just absorbed.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
I also got a gmail during the invite only. I was so stoked, I drew a picture of Link (from Wind Waker) holding a Gmail icon over his head in his triumphant "got a new item!" pose.
Some ISPs from back in the day did offer a few megs of space for a web site with a ~username url that you could use to build a personal site. But by the late 90s this practice began to wane as services like GeoShitties became the norm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personal story, but depending on when you last fed your pet, a teacher punitively confiscating your Tamagotchi until the end of the school day could mean the difference between life and death for the poor creature.
- the 56k modem must be liquid or ground up into a fine powder. the liquid route will be safer.
- the liquid or fine powder must be inside of a can or bottle for alcoholic beverages.
- for best results secure 1 or more homie(s) to occupy the immediate vincinity.
- it is the reader's responsibility to comply with any applicable environmental or littering laws. pouring a 56k modem out to one's homie(s) near a sewer drain or natural water source could lead to contanimation.
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.
Anyone remember The Palace? 1996 to uhm. Early 2000s they went bankrupt. Some people made their own clients to various degrees. The two popular ones being PalaceChat(still around, barely) and Phalanx(dead.)
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.
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.
On our LAN parties at the time, everyone started to use Trillian because of their support for the Bonjour protocol which used multicast DNS locally. That way you could easily "group teams" together, because the hostnames / IPs were also visible and you could add them then to the Hamachi groups where the games happened.
Hamachi was an amazing tool before they got bought, it made networking so easy for everyone; and you didn't even need to know what an IP was.
Palm Pilot is mentioned, but not Amiga Computers? For me it defined an era. Warez, games, hacking in assembly and Aztec C compiler. Too bad I migrated to MS DOS (yet Turbo Pascal was great), as Macs were unaffordable in Germany.
Edit: A good list anyway. AOL dial tone and AOL CDs. Lol. Spent countless hours chatting to strangers on aol.
Tamagotchi is a good example: it’s no longer the late-90s phenomenon, but it’s definitely not dead.
A small status tag could help:
- shut down - zombie / technically alive - niche but active - spiritual successor exists
That would make the debates part of the site instead of just corrections in the comments.
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.
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
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.
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)
Pope's car?? I need a wiki to that information.
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.
Gateway was purchased by Acer, so it’s not like they just disappeared. Not any more than DEC, SBC, or Studebaker anyway. They were just absorbed.
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 :)
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.
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!
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
Some ISPs from back in the day did offer a few megs of space for a web site with a ~username url that you could use to build a personal site. But by the late 90s this practice began to wane as services like GeoShitties became the norm.
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.
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.
Is there any plan to let users contribute entries or memories?
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.
- the liquid or fine powder must be inside of a can or bottle for alcoholic beverages.
- for best results secure 1 or more homie(s) to occupy the immediate vincinity.
- it is the reader's responsibility to comply with any applicable environmental or littering laws. pouring a 56k modem out to one's homie(s) near a sewer drain or natural water source could lead to contanimation.
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.
There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
Though it's still missing the Amiga, and macOS <10...
----
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.
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.
This is what happens when people which didn't live the era try to write an article with LLM slop.
I remember loving Freetalk against Mcabber and now Profanity because it could autocomplete anything you entered, not just nicknames.
Hamachi was an amazing tool before they got bought, it made networking so easy for everyone; and you didn't even need to know what an IP was.
Edit: A good list anyway. AOL dial tone and AOL CDs. Lol. Spent countless hours chatting to strangers on aol.