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Anyone Remember This Old-Time Website?

by Janice Sperry
8 replies
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This morning I had a wave of techie nostalgia sweep over me for some unknown reason.

Soon after I got my first dial-up Internet connection it seemed like I was transported into another world. I don't remember the month or the year but I only knew 3 other people that had Internet.

From my poor memory...:

A friend showed me a website that was just one page and all it had on it were links to "important" sites. He also showed me how to bookmark the page or whatever we called it back then. There might have been categories but I just remember rows and rows of links. It seemed like there were hundreds of links to things like the weather, news, shopping portals, a dictionary, jokes, quotes, government sites, and on and on. I thought the creator of this site must surely be a genius and that everyone in the world would eventually always come to this site for a fast way to find things. I know for months I used to go back to it over and over just to try new links and see where they would take me.

I seriously doubt if the site is still online but I sure hope someone can help me remember the domain name. I don't know why but not being able to remember this website is just nagging at me.
  • Profile picture of the author ksmusselman
    No, I don't remember ever seeing any one specific site like that. But what a major chore it must have been - or must still be if it's still around - to maintain it!

    I wonder how many of the sites he linked out to are still around today.

    When I saw the subject line, the very first site that came to mind was the dancing hamsters. LOL It was from 1997 and the original site hasn't been around for a while now.

    Whenever my grandson came to visit, he'd sit on my lap and laugh and laugh while I kept refreshing the page so he could watch them dance and "sing." This is all that's left now of the original:

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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I have no idea what site you're looking for but here's another flashback...
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    • Profile picture of the author Janice Sperry
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      I have no idea what site you're looking for but here's another flashback...
      Thanks for the links.

      I remember when that hit the net! That does bring back memories. The Wiki article states at the peak it hit a 127 Alexa ranking. Big bucks for the creator. I wonder if any of the advertisers got any clicks at all. A right-click to view the page source shows the hundreds of domains that were linked. Ten years later and many of the same things are still being promoted.
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  • Profile picture of the author David Beroff
    Originally Posted by Janice Sperry View Post

    A friend showed me a website that was just one page and all it had on it were links to "important" sites. He also showed me how to bookmark the page or whatever we called it back then. There might have been categories but I just remember rows and rows of links. It seemed like there were hundreds of links to things like the weather, news, shopping portals, a dictionary, jokes, quotes, government sites, and on and on. I thought the creator of this site must surely be a genius and that everyone in the world would eventually always come to this site for a fast way to find things.
    It was called "Yahoo!" They kept minimizing the importance of the directory (from where the site started) until they finally killed it off altogether. And yes, it was curated by hand. The closest remnant of the Yahoo! directory is now called:
    https://business.yahoo.com/
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    • Profile picture of the author Janice Sperry
      Originally Posted by David Beroff View Post

      It was called "Yahoo!" They kept minimizing the importance of the directory (from where the site started) until they finally killed it off altogether. And yes, it was curated by hand. The closest remnant of the Yahoo! directory is now called:
      https://business.yahoo.com/
      I don't think that was it but maybe it was. It seemed like there was an individual's name associated with it sort of like a Craig's List kind of thing. It was just as bare bones as the site you linked to but the way I remember it there were no other pages at all. No search feature either. Just a page of links.
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      • Profile picture of the author David Beroff
        Originally Posted by Janice Sperry View Post

        I don't think that was it but maybe it was. It seemed like there was an individual's name associated with it sort of like a Craig's List kind of thing. It was just as bare bones as the site you linked to but the way I remember it there were no other pages at all. No search feature either. Just a page of links.
        Right. In the mid-90's, Yahoo didn't have many other pages, nor did they yet have search. Jerry Yang and David Filo started the page in January '94 with the name, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". In April '94, they renamed it to Yahoo!, short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

        Of course, there were others trying to become "the list", and many of them were also similarly bare in visual appearance, so I can't say for certain that this is what you remember. The earliest snapshot that Archive.org has is from 1996; it looks pretty bare, compared to what we're used to today:



        Sources:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=History_of_Yahoo!
        https://web.archive.org/web/19960801...tp://yahoo.com
        How 20 popular websites looked when they launched - Telegraph
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  • Profile picture of the author Janice Sperry
    That is an amazing screen shot. I had no idea archive.org went back that far and I also had no idea how Yahoo! started. I do remember seeing and using that page (or variations of it) many times.

    I wonder if when it was still "Jerry and Dave's..." that it was just all outbound links and not links to category pages like in the screen shot? I just remember rows and rows of direct outbound links that did not even have any blurbs about the sites. You had to figure it out by how they were grouped together and the domain name of course.

    I had not thought about it but like you say there were probably lots of copycats trying to be the most authoritative lists. I guess it is unrealistic to think I could ever see a screen shot of the exact one I am remembering that long ago.

    The only home pages I remember in your "20 popular websites" link were Google, Yahoo! and Amazon. All 20 of them look absolutely ancient.

    Thanks for your research and the trip down memory lane.
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  • Profile picture of the author David Beroff
    Speaking of early Yahoo history, I still remember the first Internet marketer there. Eric Ward wrote an email to Jerry Yang in '94, asking him to create an IM category on Yahoo, as it simply didn't exist yet. Yang agreed, and placed Ward as the first entry.

    Sheesh... have I really been on the Internet for 20 years now?
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