The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it.
The whole transformation stems from there.
The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it.
The whole transformation stems from there.
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
Here's a page containing mostly material from the 90's, lovingly preserved after the author's health eventually failed decades ago:
http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm
I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible.
I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.