Mr. Kottke’s post about early web art got me prevaricating off down memory lane. I posted a big list in his comments (which I will post below this). But, what came rushing back after I posted my comment was Bob the Anal Fissure. Of all the horribly gross and funny things that showed up on the web in the “early” days of the my experience with it (1995). I remember sitting there at work, trying to stifle giggles as I talked to people on the phone and tried to fix their horrible 9600/2400 modems. Not for the faint of heart.
And the original list:
- All those “X Ate My Balls” sites
- Birdhouse.org and all those great early art pieces.
- Art.net – one of the first online galleries that I ever saw. It blew me away.
- Netscape 3.0 Beta 3 (I think) that allowed you to have animated gifs as your background. I personally crashed dozens of browsers with my original site (‘lo those many years ago).
- The SGI Cool Zone in Netscape 2.0.
- All those cool things that didn’t last – VRML 1.0, Virtual Places and The Hub (one of the first 3D avatar chat systems).
- AOL 2.5 with its horrible web browser (booklink), but with the buddy list, which revolutionized IM.
- GNN – Global Network Navigator was a site (think early Yahoo) that was once more popular than Yahoo.
- Webcrawler
Bob the Anal Fissure is just about the most disgusting, revolting, vomitus piece of absolute hilarity I’ve ever read. Kudos.
GNN was originally called MegaWeb. Don’t forget the winsock patch for AOL 2.0. Funny thing is the ftp area of AOL hasn’t changed since version 1.1. They still haven’t fixed the delete icon…
Ahhhhh GNN. I still have a Navisoft 1.0 user manual! I think that was by far the best job I EVER had. 🙂 9 guys on the tech support line taking a total of 6 calls a day (and that wasn’t per tech — that was TOTAL). 🙂 Talk about a geek’s dream come true. 🙂