The Spotlight
These few selected works represent the sky-high limits that the Old Web had. Some of these pieces are imaginative outliers, proofs of concepts, others are foundational to the web of modern-day. All in all though, they offer a glimpse into the idealism that surrounded the time of the ‘dot com’ craze. It’s important to note that because these sites weren’t hosted on Geocities, they survived the great ‘purge’. There were endless creative sites on Geocities, but the only way to access them is through archives. Go to the Archives lisst (under showcase) if you want to see some examples.
- ‘Bob’
- This is a digital version of a magic 8 ball! The oracle Bob will answer any simple question one asks, giving suspiciously similar (read: verbatim) answers to a physical magic 8 ball. Strange enough, Bob finds himself involved in other odd jobs, mainly being the spearhead of a cult. (Whether it’s a real cult or meant to serve as criticism, like Satanism, is still up for debate.)
- The Simulator
- Displaying the standard ‘run-of-the-mill’ day of its creator Garnet, it allots the user branching paths of decisions, much like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. But unlike the aforementioned books, (and yet very similar to a typical day), the story itself is anticlimactic, and repeats itself upon completion.
- Ted's Caving Page
- Ted’s caving page last updated on May 19 of 2001. This site gave way to a new genre of storytelling called the ‘Creepypasta’, with one of the main features of the genre being suspension of disbelief. There is no indication anywhere that these logs of Ted’s are fictitious, leading some to wonder whether something really did happen to Ted. Is this site a tall tale, or a true story? Nobody knows.
- Space Jam
- This site was left untouched until the release of the Newest 2021 movie, Space Jam: A New Legacy. The address states this original website was set up in 1996. Here we see the ‘starry background’, a very popular choice for personal website-builders, likely because these images seamlessly repeated into patterns.
- Stinkymeat
- The Stinkymeat Project details a man’s experiments, performed during the summers of 2000 and 2001. This site best showcases the ‘gross out’ humor prevalent in popular media of the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. This is all that the site is. Somebody documenting the decomposition of a plate of meat. Groundbreaking.
- AliWeb
- Aliweb, established in 1993 is (or was) a hand-curated directory that would serve as one’s springboard into the Web, much like Yahoo! initially was. (Fun fact: At its conception, Yahoo! was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle). Nowadays, however, most of the sites Aliweb links to are either offline or basic sites, like apple.com.
(Huh. Weird. For some reason, this site's a little camera shy, so it won't appear on a preview screen. I blame AngelFire. Instead, here's some of the Ted's photos, sans context.)
(AliWeb is another one that won't play nice with the preview window. Enjoy this screenshot I took instead.)
There are just a few small examples of what could be accomplished on the 'read only web'. People were finding ways from day one to present information in an engaging way. The sky's the limit.