The Old Websites Thread

[IBM]

The website for the film Space Jam has been updated to promote a sequel to the original film. I believe this is the first time that site has been updated in approx. 25 years.. The original site can still be accessed at spacejam.com/1996


The only other site I know of that vintage that exists unmodified is that of the Heaven's Gate cult, which looks to be very much a product of that era.

Do you know of any other sites that have far outlived their original purpose?

It's my first thread here, so if this is inappropriate or in the wrong place, feel free to close it.

[Cassia Tuna]

Craig Charles of Red Dwarf fame has a website still online that hasn't been updated since January 2001. It's quite the sight (site?) to behold:

https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/intro.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/entrance1.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/Gig-Guide/gigguide.html [Last updated on 18/09/00]

Loving the vintage adverts, too!



Obviously websites like these are no longer relevant in the age of social media where any celebrity can ping out an update to millions of followers in seconds.

[Neil Jones]

Do you know of any other sites that have far outlived their original purpose?

The first website was created in August 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a European nuclear research agency. Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser was made publicly available that month. The first webpage was thus:
[url="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html"]http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html[/url]

AFAIK still in the same state as it was in 1992.

There are many sites still around that date from the 1990s, most high profile of which are probably Bloomberg, IMDb and MTV (albeit they had to sue an employee for it, but it first came online in 1993 from said employee and they took it over in 1994). Fogcam dates from 1994 as well. None of these sites exist in their original version today as they're all actively used, but they are grandfathers of websites.

In fact IMDb can date its roots back to 1990 on Usenet, before becoming a website in its own right, and ultimately being an early example of something being eaten by Amazon in 1998.

[L1]

The site for Litecore Animation, a company who designed various bits and pieces for TV in the 90s including the Cartlton idents; http://www.litecore.co.uk/mainframe.htm

I always wonder how do they actually stay online? Is there somebody renewing hosting and domain every few years?

[Neil Jones]

Well that Litecore one is registered to Plusnet Plc t/a Madasafish Broadband in the whois details. Madasafish hasn't provided internet services since 2016 (they were part of Bright Group which BT bought in 2007), its all handled by Plusnet (which BT also own, but run at arms length).

There used to be a time where you could get a free domain with your broadband package and this was the case with Madasafish. So presumably that will vanish when the customer stops paying (or moves provider).

Outside of this arrangement though, all domains/hosting expire if you don't pay for it. Domain names on their own are laughably cheap these days anyway, hosting can be got relatively inexpensively (or you can do it yourself) so it needn't cost the earth for it.

[VMPhil]

Craig Charles of Red Dwarf fame has a website still online that hasn't been updated since January 2001. It's quite the sight (site?) to behold:

https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/intro.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/entrance1.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/Gig-Guide/gigguide.html [Last updated on 18/09/00]

Loving the vintage adverts, too!



Obviously websites like these are no longer relevant in the age of social media where any celebrity can ping out an update to millions of followers in seconds.

I think what's happened here is someone has registered the domain after it had lapsed, downloaded the site from the Wayback Machine, then reuploaded it to make it look like it was still there.

Look at the main index page - crying laughing emojis didn't exist in 2001 (that was obviously an image that wasn't captured by the Wayback Machine that they've tried to cover up).

[Cassia Tuna]

Do you know of any other sites that have far outlived their original purpose?

The first website was created in August 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a European nuclear research agency. Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser was made publicly available that month. The first webpage was thus:
[url="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html"]http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html[/url]

AFAIK still in the same state as it was in 1992.

There are many sites still around that date from the 1990s, most high profile of which are probably Bloomberg, IMDb and MTV (albeit they had to sue an employee for it, but it first came online in 1993 from said employee and they took it over in 1994). Fogcam dates from 1994 as well. None of these sites exist in their original version today as they're all actively used, but they are grandfathers of websites.

In fact IMDb can date its roots back to 1990 on Usenet, before becoming a website in its own right, and ultimately being an early example of something being eaten by Amazon in 1998.

Nice to see a show called "Cuties" that isn't about pre-pubescent girls twerking!

[IBM]

Thanks for all the links everyone.

I've had a good time clicking through them all. I'm a bit surprised that of all the pages I've viewed I haven't yet come across a meta tag with a generator attribute to let you know what software the author was using. I recall a lot of the WYSIWYG editors back in that day used to do this.

It's interesting to consider how web development has changed over time, although the tools are better now, I feel like we've moved away from the sort of code generation these editors used to do and moved back toward more fine-grained control at the markup level, even if that isn't writing HTML directly.

[Neil Jones]

There wasn't really a need for WYSIWYG editors for websites until the advent of table support, which allowed for more pretty layouts in a frame - before tables came along web pages just consisted of:

Code:

Hello World!
I'm bold!
I'm Italic!
I'm red bold!

I'm a list!

Sort of code. Not particularly complicated. So it was easy to do by hand as it was just a structured list (any modern website designed properly that loses its formatting by accident or through browser not loading it for whatever reason should fall back to this) - emphasis on content, not looking pretty.

Of course this soon went out the window and websites began to look pretty, through tables and CSS and whatever else. These days table layouts still exist to an extent but they're not "tables" as such, they just look like tables.

[madmusician]

Craig Charles of Red Dwarf fame has a website still online that hasn't been updated since January 2001. It's quite the sight (site?) to behold:

https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/intro.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/entrance1.htm
https://www.craigcharles.co.uk/Gig-Guide/gigguide.html [Last updated on 18/09/00]

Loving the vintage adverts, too!



Obviously websites like these are no longer relevant in the age of social media where any celebrity can ping out an update to millions of followers in seconds.

That has given me a good laugh, not least Craig Charles’ reflections on the third series of Robot Wars. This particular sentence was my favourite:

“We did have an unfortunate incident where a robot actually attacked the Asst Director after a fight had ended, causing him to be hospitalised... But having said that, the safety regulations enforced are second to none...”

It was quite an infamous incident in the history of Robot Wars and led to the legendary robeteer Rex Garrod (the creator of Brum, amongst other things) pulling out of the show in protest - but it really ticked me to see it described like that above!

[swaggyboi128]

https://www.channeltv.co.uk/
Channel TV's website is still up, the copyright says 2007