Links Directory
Welcome to the Dock, traveler! Here you can find an entire fleet of ships waiting to take you to exciting locales in exotic lands all over the vast sea of cyberspace! Happy adventuring and be sure to stay safe out there!
I believe that we are, unfortunately enough, living in a dark era much like the one that preceded AltaVista and Google. Due to how flooded most search engines are with crap mainstream websites (
Wiby being the most notable exception,) it has become difficult if not impossible to find actual quality websites by searching for them, and links pages on regular websites have once again become the best tool for finding other good websites.
As such, I am always looking to expand this section. If you have any links that you think I should add, please
contact me and let me know. Sites that have Web 1.0-ish designs and/or are relevant to the below categories are preferred.
A few of the sites have buttons, depending on whether buttons exist for them and/or if I felt like making one for them. If you see your site here and have a button that you want me to use for its link, please send it to me and I will add it.
Click-able Table of Contents
Hugo Landau - A personal website featuring a plethora of well-written articles, mainly dealing with subjects related to computing.
- A nostalgic Y2K Web forum community dedicated to the discussion of video games, politics, paranormal, religion, and other topics.
Blauheim's Realm - A work-in-progress site that is set to feature writings on topics spanning linguistics, history, retro-gaming, dreams, and other subjects. Also music, WADs, and other artistic work by the webmaster.
- A website featuring some interesting personal projects, shrines to some neat old technology, and other cool stuff.
- A very comfy Web 1.0 website featuring the author's musical work, Flash animations, writings, artwork, quirky original characters, and other interesting things. It also has a very aesthetic design that is backwards compatible right back to at least Internet Explorer 4, and features a vast, well-made links page. Now also features a page of the author's Microsoft Comic Chat avatars. The webmaster is a man of many talents, to say the least.
- The funky and uniquely designed website of Beth, a transhumanist and writer of transhumanist-positive fiction. The site features a very nice Old Web shrine, and some
very high quality writing. While the website was tragically deleted in 2021, it is survived by the aforelinked partial Archive.org backup.
- The burgeoning personal website of my good friend and fellow digital entity. About SEARCHING FOR PARADISE
- A whimsical new Neocities site designed to showcase the author's many interests.
- A comfy and cute Neocities page currently hosting information on the creator's favourite bird species, some algebraic geometry exercises, a fan shrine to Alice Nanagaki from Dasaku, and an incredibly well-written creepypasta story. The writing on this website is well worth reading for the comedic value even if the topics do not pique your interest.
- A KolymaNET website that contains - among other things - some humourous and informative articles on internet culture history, and a massive Links page. There is a Neocities mirror
here that is no longer updated save for the change log.
- A very pretty website that looks as if it was authentically designed in the early 2000s and only just now went online. Features various computer game mods, computer gaming guides, and a links page.
- The personal website of my friend and fellow Aspie and self-hosting Chad. Will feature articles eventually.
- An absolute computer genius' personal website. Currently features a blog and some information about the owner, with some guides on technology to come.
Painless Destiny - The official, based Web 1.0 website of the Finnish piano artist Painless Destiny.
- A wonderfully pink website featuring an adorable Strawberry Facts page, Japanese game translations, and an adorable and elegant design. Don't miss the glorious background MIDI on the front page (requires Internet Explorer or a MIDI-playing plugin)!
- The comfy budding Neocities site of my friend and fellow veteran of the 90s Web, ShadowM00n. Features a relaxing and pleasant aesthetic and a number of informative, humourous, and interesting articles related to computer games and technology. Come for the useful technical advice, stay for the entertaining gaming articles. Don't miss
the Microsoft Comic Chat article if you are a Linux Chad and have any interest in trying out
the greatest IRC client of all time.
Soukds - A cute, cheery, and optimistic website that currently features a collection of links and some of the Webmaster's thoughts.
Svetlana Studios - The budding personal portfolio website of an up-and-coming animator and illustrator.
YouTuube - A neat website spotlighting the good old days of the Web, most specifically YouTube. It also contains comprehensive lists of other interesting websites if excellent website designs and Web nostalgia aren't enough to reel you in.
- A vast collection of personal websites and blogs by Actually Autistic people such as myself.
Ancient-Greek.net - A genuine hand-made Web 1.0 site hosting a steadily growing repository of information about the Ancient Greek language.
- A growing, shiny personal site dedicated to the Y2K author's interests.
- An adorable and superbly designed website on Neocities. It looks like a number of the sections are still under construction (or just unreachable due to some oddities in Pale Moon) but what's there is already more than pretty enough to warrant a visit.
- A steadily growing dark Myspace-esque website. Not much content yet, but the design is well worth looking at.
- A website showcasing some cute art and other miscellaneous things, and offering commissions. The website comes in both a plain text version and a spiffier more Geocities style version.
- An impressive and fairly massive website featuring all sorts of content related to retro gaming, Web culture, music, programming, and so forth.
- The personal website of the supremely talented indie musician and writer Grafo Volaverunt. Check out his work and donate to him if you like it!
- A cute little up and coming website dedicated to the author's soulbonds, crafting, and media they are a fan of.
- The website of a fellow autistic person and old Web nostalgic, featuring her art and other creative work.
- A pretty little site featuring a links page and, eventually, a choose-your-own-adventure game and shrines to games and films that the author likes.
- A vast organised archive of homesteaders and netizens from all over Neocities.
- A comfy site featuring a blog, a links page, recipes, and some PDF/text books for download.
This page makes some excellent points for setting up one's own homestead in cyberspace, if you are some who does not have one but are interested in the idea.
- The very cute personal Neocities website of Pztlz. The entire website features some pretty top-notch Web 1.0 designs, and the front page especially gives off a very strong vibe of nostalgia for the great web that once was...
- An adorable pink personal Neocities website featuring the author's artistic work and general nostalgia. May or may not be abandoned...
- A masterfully designed online castle dedicated to the author's various interests. Worth an adventure on if you want to see a testament to just what can be accomplished with personal websites.
The Chronicles - A particularly disturbing and enigmatic corner of the Web. Still not sure if this is meant to be artistic or if the author is simply insane.
- A groovy celebration of the old Web, creativity, and the glory of being a Webmaster.
- Not safe for epileptic people.
WOS Home - An all-purpose resource cataloging links to various videos and websites, as well as the author's own advice posts.
Marginalia Search - An open source search engine designed to find sites that are non-commercial and more obscure. An absolute breath of fresh air given how seemingly every search one makes on one of the big, mainstream search engines just returns pages from the same few bloated mainstream websites.
- Every once in a blue moon, I discover a website that makes me question whether or not I'm awake or having an exceedingly fantastical dream. Old'aVista, one such website, is an attempt to resurrect the legendary pioneering 90s search engine AltaVista. Far from just a pretty design mimicking the old AltaVista site, Old'aVista's creators recreated the original search engine's index via scraping it on Archive.org, and replaced the result links with links to archived versions. It even runs on ancient browsers! A delight for Web spelunkers, historians, and nostalgics alike. Absolutely do not miss this one.
The Old Net - An Old Web resource allowing you to virtually travel back in time by providing a simple way to see what any archived website looked like during a particular year through Archive.org and providing a way to partially search Archive.org's vaults. More importantly, it also provides
a Web proxy that automatically pulls archived versions of any website you visit, from whatever year you specified when connecting.
- A
very special search engine that only delivers results from the Web 1.0 parts of the Internet (which Neocities and this website are a part of.) If you miss the days of the web consisting primarily of smaller, personal websites designed by nerds, hobbyists, academics, etc instead of commercialised crap, this search engine is worth spending some time with.
Archive.org - This absolute godsend of a website is an incomprehensibly vast library containing archived versions of countless websites. You can find both old versions of existing websites, as well as extinct websites that can no longer accessed anywhere other than this site. In addition to the website archive that it is well known for, Archive.org also hosts a massive collection of books, movies, computer programs, and so forth.
VidLii - A thriving spiritual successor to the good old YouTube of the Y2K era, now fittingly headed by legendary Old Web stalwart
lolwut himself. In contrast to its sibling BitView, VidLii ls older and larger, and features laxer rules. There are also multiple channel layouts and skins to choose from.
BitView - A second bastion of old YouTube culture,
also now headed by the great lolwut. It is closer to the design of the old YouTube, and is meant to be a faithful recreation of the golden era version of the once-great video website.
- A delightfully fancy and colourful Web 1.0-centric search engine and directory. A sort of budding, fancier version of Wiby, it would seem.
DMOZ - A huge website directory that groups millions of websites (many of them web 1.0 sites on Angelfire and Tripod) by a wide variety of categories. Reminds me a lot of looking up websites in the old directories that Yahoo! had 20-some years ago.
Curlie - This appears to be an alternate version of the DMOZ archive. It was updated more recently and features the ability to manually search for sites, but appears to have less total websites in its archive.
GEOCITIES.ws - A hosting service similiar to Neocities, that also hosts a partial backup of the original Geocities.
The Geocities Gallery - A restoration and visual gallery of the archived Geocities homesteads.
OoCities - Another partial backup of the original Geocities. This one is much more easy to access and look through than the one on Geocities.ws.
Cameron's World - A huge, adorable collage made out of gifs from Geocities websites. Many of the gifs will take you to the archived website that they came from, if you click on them.
The Website Obesity Crisis - An excellent speech decrying the bloated, centralised, shartphone-centric web of new and arguing for why everyone would benefit for a return to the web of olde.
Peelopaalu - A website directory with a pretty decent set of links for you to surf to.
- The gracious hosts of countless wonderful websites, who are bringing the spirit of freedom and creativity from the world wide Web of olde back to life. You can find all sorts of wonderful sites that are hosted on there, about all sorts of topics. Many are Web 1.0 themed like mine, but not all.
see also: Archive.org in the "Search Engines" section below, to attempt to look up Geocities sites that didn't get saved by WS or OoCities.
Ecosia - A nice little pro-privacy search engine that pledges to use its revenue to plant trees.
FrogFind! - A unique search engine designed for older computers. It works as a proxy for DuckDucKGo, and strips search results down to text and basic HTML, removing all of the bloat that would make older computers unable to process them. Truly, this is the hero many of us desperately needed.
GifCities - Yet another unique search engine. This one trawls Archive.org's Geocities archive for gifs with keywords matching your search query.
MIDISite - A special search engine designed specifically for finding MIDI files.
TinEye - A supreme reverse image search engine, possibly the best out there as of this writing. As good as it is, I would highly recommend combining it with the reverse image search features of Yandex, Google, and Bing, if you are doing a serious research, just to be safe.
- The most popular search engine in Russia, and
the official search engine of Koshka's Kingdom. Yandex features a top notch search engine, a great free e-mail service, a fantastic maps tool, a world class translating service, and various other free tools. I personally use their e-mail service for my own e-mail, and make use of their other tools periodically. Some people might be paranoid about the Russian government spying on you through this service, but I would argue that that's quite an improvement over Google spying on you.
see also: Marginalia, Old'aVista, and Wiby in the "Web 1.0 General" section above, for the search engines that you'll want to use for traveling the Web 1.0 part of the Web.
per-Bast - A very informative website that provides historical information about Bast and what is known about the history of Her worship and the various interpretations of Her over the centuries. Probably the most informative website about Her that exists. The name of the website is the Egyptian pronunciation of Bubastis, a city in ancient Egypt that was known for having a temple dedicated to Bast, making it a center for Her worship.
Virtualave's Bast Page - A beautiful little tribute page to Bast that contains a quick rundown about Her and the known history of Her worship in Kemet. Of interest also is
a shrine page to Her, linked to at the bottom of the page, which contains a very nice prayer to the feline Goddess. This page is actually just a subset of the
whole website, which contains interesting information on a number of either mostly or completely forgotten historical Goddesses.
Alley Cat Allies - A wonderful organisation that works to protect the lives of homeless cats.
Gods and Pharaohs - A snazzy Neocities hosting information on multiple Kemetic Gods, including Bast, along with other Ancient Egyptian themes.
Kemet.org - Official website of the Kemetic Orthodoxy sect of Kemetism. I don't entirely subscribe to their teachings, but they're big enough that I thought them worth a link.
- A non-profit autistic rights movement that, unlike many fraudulent organisations that are run by neurotypicals and seek to "cure" autism, is run entirely by autistic people. "Nothing About Us, Without Us!"
Aspie Tests - A series of online autism-related tests. The RAADS and AQ tests are probably the most reliable way to determine whether one is autistic without a formal diagnosis, and helped me confirm my own autism.
NeuroClastic - Formerly the Aspergian, this is a blog by autistic people full of information about their various diverse experiences of living as an autistic person.
Neurotypical Personality Disorder - A humourous article that describes neurotypicality (the lack of autism) in the same negative style that psychologists use to describe autism. Are autistics
really the ones with a "disorder"? This one ultimately inspired
my own version of this joke, although I have no idea if this is indeed the first iteration.
AspiGurl - Humourous comic about the autistic experience, by an autistic woman.
Too Much Information - A series of videos created by the UK-based National Autistic Society that showcase what some everyday experiences can feel like to some autistic people, especially "low-functioning" ones.
The Articulate Autistic - An Actually Autistic blog, centered around dispelling misconceptions about autistic people's behaviour, and explaining why we do the often unintentionally off-putting things that we do.
Quility Blankets - Including them here just because they're the company that made my (fantastic) weighted blanket. A company and a product that I would recommend to anybody who is autistic and/or suffers from anxiety or depression. This is not a paid endorsement.
see also: Actually Autistic Blogs List in the "Affiliates" section above, for a list of resources penned by Actually Autistic authors.
Closer to Truth - A website that features literally thousands of interviews with scientists and other intelligent figures about a wide variety of scientific and philosophical topics. Covering everything from the far future of the universe to the mystery of consciousness. Definitely a site that one can get lost in.
Timelapse of the Future - Probably the greatest YouTube video that I've ever seen. It's nearly 30 minutes long but worth every second. It demonstrates (with some surprisingly good graphics) how the universe is expected to evolve and eventually run down and die over the next ~googol (10
100) years going by current known physics. The soundtrack is absolutely beautiful and makes the video worth watching alone. There's a few inaccuracies and a few things that I feel should have been mentioned. Feel free to visit the astrophysics section of this page for some detailed rants on the subject. (:
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur - Official website of the physicist YouTuber Isaac Arthur, who explores and discusses a wide variety of topics and their plausibility under known physics. The topics he covers include but are not limited to: colonisation of black holes, the evolution of life that thrives in the void of space, the many different possible versions of the multiverse, Boltzmann brains, and terraforming the inimical planet Venus. Mr. Arthur's full catalogue of videos can be found on his YouTube channel
here.
arXiv - A massive archive of scientific papers (mostly physics) hosted and maintained by Cornell University. All of the articles are free to read.
Sci-Hub - An invaluable resource that enables one to access scientific papers without having to pay exorbitant fees. All you have to do is paste the url of the paper that you want to download into the textbox and click the "open" button.
Beyond Earthly Skies - An interesting blog that contains dozens of articles on various planets, stars, and other bodies that exist or may hypothetically exist. There are some very interesting takes about hypothetical scenarios involving stellar remnants in the far future that I have never seen mentioned anywhere else.
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - An existentially terrifying, but also very accurate, representation of the true size of the solar system, using a scale where our entire Moon is represented with only one pixel. I recommend using the arrow keys at the top to scroll through the presentation quicker unless you're autistic and have no plans for the day beyond seeing just how much empty space is inside our solar system.
Black Hole Temperature Calculator - An online calculator that estimates the temperature of a black hole by its mass. The main take-away here is how mind-bogglingly cold any (naturally forming and non-primordial) black hole is.
Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell - A YouTube channel that produces very cute videos about cosmology and other scientific topics. Their videos are designed such that any audience can easily understand them, but the cute visuals and relaxing narrator make them perfect for watching before bed.
Prehistoric Wildlife - A wonderful Web 1.0 site that hosts information on hundreds of prehistoric animal species. Truly the (sabre-toothed) cat's meow.
Biology of Sharks and Rays - An informative website about shark biology. Contains some great introductory information on the evolution of this glorious predator over the past 450 million years.
The Devonian Times - A website dedicated mainly to information about tetrapods from the Devonian Period.
A Guide to the Orders of Trilobites - A vast and very much Web 1.0-y website dedicated to information about Trilobites - a prolific yet mysterious group of ancient arthropods that filled our planet for hundreds of millions of years.
DOSBox - A wonderful emulator that allows you to play DOS games on a system that does not natively support DOS (which, in this day and age, is essentially every system). Still very useful today even in the age of GOG, both because there are far too many DOS games for every single one to be updated to run on modern systems. Some of GOG's versions of DOS games, such as Raptor, also have some detrimental differences compared to the original game.
DOSBox SVN-Daum - A fork of DOSBox that adds, among other things, some high quality filters that mimic the look of a CRT monitor. This makes a world of difference, since DOS games were created in an era where everyone was using CRT monitors, and thus the art was designed to look best on those kinds of monitors.
Pale Moon -
The greatest web browser available today and the browser that I personally have been using for some 5 or so years now. Although it is still one of the best options available, it has become significantly less and less respectable due to a number of bone-headed decisions made by its developers.
This page breaks down the situation pretty well.
Ungoogled Chromium - A version of Chromium with the Google botnet surgically removed. A worthy alternative to Pale Moon for anyone who is fed up with the arrogance of their developers, and is willing to put up with Chromium's hideous interface.
foobar2000 - The only audio player that you will ever need, assuming you're on a Windows computer anyway. Although it comes with a nice and simplistic interface by default, it is extremely customizeable and can be molded however you wish.
Notepad++ - An extremely high-quality, open source Notepad alternative designed for Windows. Primarily designed for writing and editing code. Every part of this website was designed entirely in Notepad++, (aside from the images, which I either made in Photoshop or found online) so there's that...
irssi - The only IRC client you will ever need.
Pidgin - The only general chat program you will ever need. Less useful these days with AIM and MSN no longer existing, but it does also work with IRC, Steam, Discord, etc, although you may need to use extensions to use some protocols. I highly recommend using the OTR plug-in, and encouraging anybody that you chat with to do the same, in order to keep your conversations encrypted and private.
Mozilla Thunderbird - Mozilla's alternative to Microsoft to Outlook. I don't know if there's any better alternatives, but Thunderbird has been treating me well for a very long time so I am recommending them.
Inkscape - A superb free and open source vector drawing program that is an excellent alternative to the costly and proprietary Adobe Illustrator. Very handy for creating artwork, even if you lack drawing talent.
K-Meleon - A fairly good old school, open source web browser. Sadly it does not get updated much anymore and may not render all modern websites properly due to lack of support for standards.
MANMRK - An ancient website featuring a wealth of (now) quite obscure and esoteric computer information and links to RV-related resources. Of particular interest may be the
DOS and
Assembly sections.
x86 ASM Tutorial - A set of preliminary and miscellaneous tutorials for x86 Assembly.
Phoenix - A pro-free speech organisation boldly attempting to resurrect AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and old versions of ICQ on their own servers. I cannot comment on the other ones, but their AIM service is excellent aside from some recurring stability when connecting from my beloved Pidgin instead of the official AIM client. To their credit, they are a tiny operation attempting to take on quite a massive responsibility.
IRC Reviews IRC Client List - An impressive although still not entirely comprehensive list of IRC clients for various operating systems, along with basic information on them. No one needs an IRC client that isn't
Irssi or
Microsoft Comic Chat, but it's good to know there are a plethora of alternatives anyway!
Dig Deeper - A very helpful Neocities website with some very useful information on protecting your privacy online, as well as some other stuff. Notably there is a very good write-up on the many problems inherent in a (late-stage) capitalist society. A great website to dedicate an evening or two to perusing.
Spyware Watchdog - Another very helpful privacy-centred Neocities website. This one contains articles on a wide variety of programs and online services and discusses how trustworthy each of them are known to be in terms of respecting the user's privacy.
W3Schools - A supremely helpful website for learning (or brushing up on your knowledge of) web design, from basic HTML/CSS to JavaScript and PHP. I personally have referenced it quite a few times while putting this website together.
10 Minute Mail - This website generates an anonymous e-mail address for you that lives for exactly 10 minutes, although you can refresh the clock before it expires if you need a bit more time. Perfect for when a website forces you to register an account, but you don't actually want to commit, or just don't want to risk getting spam from them or want to be completely anonymous.
CD.TEXTFILES - An utterly massive archive of files pulled from shovelware floppies and CDs from the 1980s and 1990s.
WinWorld - A website that archives abandoned old versions of operating systems, namely of Windows and Microsoft DOS. Most interesting I think is the unreleased/beta Windows versions that they have on there, but this website is also supremely useful for anyone who wants to relive the glorious bygone eras of Windows 9x, whether via virtual machine or an actual old PC.
Richard Stallman's Personal Website - The Web 1.0 site of the great Richard Stallman. Among other things, this site contains a lot of good information on why you should avoid many popular websites and programs,
Nathan's Toasty Technology Page - An ancient Web 1.0 page that I remember reading back in the day. It still gets updated to this day and contains a massive collection of entertaining GUI reviews, including for every version of Windows. The ridiculously over the top anti-Internet Explorer page is comic gold but really needs a complementary section about the Great Satan that is google chrome.
Graham's World Wide Web Server - A cute little Web 1.0 site with a number of nifty downloads, including a bunch of retro Windows screensavers.
Porkbun - An excellent and fairly cheap domain registrar, and the one I personally use. Among other things, they provide WHOIS privacy free of charge. This is not a paid endorsement.
Introduction to Windows XP - A nostalgic Neocities site that lets you relive the introductory guide from Windows XP. Now if only there was something like this for Windows 98...
W3 Validator - A handy and official tool for validating whether a website adheres to HTML4, XHTML, HTML5, and other official Web standards. Make sure to avoid actually selecting what standard you are aiming to validate (this should be information that it can glean from reading the file), as it for some reason throws out an error even if the website adheres perfectly to standards.
DevGuru - An old school reference site that includes documentation on HTML4 and XHTML tags, great if you (like myself) stick to old school standards and are tired of seeing W3Schools brow-beating you on perfectly useful tags being "deprecated" in newer standards.
Little Web Hut - Another useful old school reference site similiar to DevGuru, which includes a tag reference guide for HTML4 and XHTML, as well as tutorials for JavaScript, Inkscape, and GIMP.
LÆMEUR's Home Page - An old school personal website containing information about some of the author's computer-related projects. It includes a splendid DOS VGA font which I have used for a few decorations on this website.
Internet Pioneers - A guide to the most important figures in Internet history, and their roles in developing it into what it is today.
Computer Hope - An ancient (1998!) computer help website that tackles a myriad of topics from the basic to the more advanced.
YewTube - A very useful Web proxy that allows you to view YouTube videos without getting tracked
and without being subjected to endless Liberty Mutual advertisements.
Catbox.moe - A cute, free file host.
Uguu.se - Another cute, free file host. This one automatically deletes your files after 48 hours.
Free Software Foundation - The official website of the Free Software Foundation.
-
THE go-to website for anything Microsoft Comic Chat related. Features vast treasure troves of downloadable custom characters (I personally got mine from
this one), backgrounds, and a wealth of information including backups of other Microsoft Comic Chat sites. Truly an admirable resource.
Modern IRC Client Protocol - A write-up documenting the specifications of the IRC client protocol, from the well-known, to the rather obscure.
Netsplit.de - An IRC-centric website that features a search engine capable of finding non-private IRC channels on any of the major IRC networks.
Web Design Group - An invaluable Web design resource that features, among other things, comprehensive references for HTML 4 and HTML 3.2.
Yes, I am aware of how out-of-place this button is with the rest of the page design. I created it stream-of-consciousness without regard for the page design, and then was disgusted by my attempts to make it fit, due to them reminding me of modern Windows. I LIKE IT, EVEN IF IT STICKS OUT LIKE A SWOLLEN THUMB ON A PARAKEET
95 is Alive - An ancient website cataloging tips and tweaks to continue using Windows 95 in the modern world. It's outdated and at this point, it's sadly impossible to use even Windows 98 SE for most things, but the website is still an interesting historical resource.
KernelEx - A compatibility layer that allows for running Windows NT (Windows 2000 and XP) programs on Windows 98 and Me. If you want to do anything on a computer running those old operating systems, you will need this.
Mypal - A fork of Pale Moon designed to work on Windows XP. Essentially the only browser worth using for anyone based enough to still be on Windows XP in this day and age.
Retro Windows Wiki - A small wiki cataloguing information on extending and using old versions of Windows in the modern world. The focus is primarily Windows XP, as I believe this resource was originally an XP-specific one, but other versions are also covered in lesser detail.
Re-version Utility - A nifty utility that can be used to make programs run on earlier versions of Windows than would otherwise be possible, provided that the only reason they will not run is because they are artificially forcing a newer version due to their compiler.
skipster1337's Site - A GitHub page cataloguing many Windows XP resources, from patches to extend the operating system, to the most recent versions of useful programs that will still run on Windows XP. Cherish it.
The Eric Experiment - A snazzy website made by an old Internet nostalgic featuring many different computing resources, the most interesting of which is possibly the extensive (but unfinished) catalogue of Windows 3.1 resources. If you're a wildman/wildwoman intending to run Windows 3.1 (and possibly even, dare I say it, surf the Web on it), you cannot afford to miss this site.
ThemeWorld - A
vast archive of Windows 9x themes, that is somehow still standing as of this writing. Unless you're based enough to still be using Windows 95/98/2000/Me/XP, this is sadly useless aside from historical value, seeing how modern Windows completely refuses to let you use the old 9x interface. Very sad because there's a lot of top-notch stuff here.
win31.de - An English/German site dedicated to Windows 3.1, featuring a myriad of tips and tricks for modifying and extending the ancient operating system. Did you know that it is possible to set up a Start Menu, the prominent new feature of 3.1's successor Windows 95, in 3.1? Well, you do now!
Windows Update Restored - A website containing Windows Update files for Windows 95 through Vista, since Microsoft no longer provides this service. This website uses ActiveX so you will need to use Internet Explorer to download anything, specifically version 5.5 (to which a link is provided) or higher.
Windows XP Guide - A terrific and friendly write-up by my good friend Prints, making the case for switching back to Windows XP in the current year, outlining potental issues and concerns, along with work-arounds, and detailing recommended software for various tasks. I, for one, can vouch that the writer knows their subject matter very well.
nosleep - A massive subreddit dedicated to creepypastas. While it contains a lot of subpar content, it is also the birthplace of many of the greatest and scariest creepypastas of all time, including Infected Town, The Patient that Nearly Drove Me out of Medicine, A Spire in the Woods, Has Anyone Heard of the Left/Right Game?. All Eighteen Lives of Omen the Cat, and so forth. A great site to browse on a dark and spooky night.
Creepypasta.com - A pretty good resource for creepypastas. The quality of the stories can vary a lot, and there's a number of sub-par stories with high ratings, and vice versa, but it's at least easier to maneuver through than Nosleep.
Creepypasta Wikia - Another big creepypasta site. I haven't spent much time on here, and the average story quality seems lower than on the two aforementioned sites, but I figure it's worth including it just because of its sheer size.
see also: the Haunted House page for reviews of and links to my favourite creepypastas.
z2 - The largest ZZT website in existence, as well as one of the oldest. While unfortunately never being updated anymore, it hosts an enormous database that contains almost every ZZT game that has ever been released. If you have any interest in ZZT whatsoever, this website is an absolute must.
Exploited Chaos - Website of the legendary ZZTer Viovis, creator of PPDV2 and dozens of other classic games. It includes a massive database of games that rivals z2's database in size, as well as a very nice Web 1.0 website design and some other interesting resources.
Zandor 12's Den - Website of the great Zandor 12. It contains his various released ZZT games (Mind Vomit especially is worth a playthrough or two,) as well as the dozens of high quality Jetpack levels that he has created, a comedic story, and a number of other things that one may or may not find interesting. It also features a top notch web 1.0 design and has a dancing penguin at the bottom of each page. If that isn't enough to make you pay the website a visit, I don't know what is.
Interactive Fantasies - The website of the legendary Interactive Fantasies, a ZZT game-creating "company" responsible for some of the best games in ZZT's entire history. This website also contains details and downloads for all of the 24HoZZT contests that were held from 1998 to 2003.
ZZT Heaven - The ancient personal website of the famed ZZTer Cly5m. It features screenshots and downloads of his games, some useful utilities for ZZT, and a top notch Web 1.0 design.
MadTom's Pick - The website of legendary ZZTer MadTom, containing reviews of what he considered to be the best ZZT game released each month from July 2002 all the way to August 2004.
see also: DOSBox in the "Programs and Other Computer Related Resources" section below, for playing ZZT on a system that does not natively support DOS programs
KeenWiki - A large Wiki that contains a lot of good information on the legendary Commander Keen series of games, and also houses a large amount of mods for additional Keen adventures.
Cerebral Cortex 314 - An ancient Commander Keen fansite that contains a bunch of useful information about the Keen games.
The Official Dopefish Home Page - A very informative website dedicated to the legendary Dopefish from Commander Keen 4.
Quillax Ship - A superbly designed Web 1.0-style website housing some Commander Keen mods and fangames. I noticed that there seem to be two separate domains for this website. I'm not sure which one is the right one, so you can try to use
this one if the first link ever goes down.
Public Commander Keen Forum - A still active forum dedicated to the Commander Keen series.
Benvolio's Workbench - An ancient (2004!) Commander Keen website containing a cornucopia of promising-looking Commander Keen mods/fangames, including Christmas and Halloween themed ones!
DOS Classics Commander Keen Directory - An enigmatic archive of otherwise-defunct ancient Commander Keen pages, living in a hidden directory on what appears to be a derelict and empty website. Beyond the general Web Archaeology excitement, there are some delicious Keen-related fan theories and trivia to be slurped up here.
see also: Shikadi.net in the "Retro Games General" section below. I did not include it in this section because it is dedicated to information on a plethora of retro games, but it is foremost a Commander Keen site.
Jazz Jackrabbit Online - A wonderful, fairly large Jazz Jackrabbit web 1.0 fansite that has been around since 1999. There's plenty of information about everyone's favourite hare
(who isn't Dyspo,) as well as downloads of additional fan-made adventures for him.
Lori Central - An ancient fan-shrine to Lori Jackrabbit, Jazz Jackrabbit's sister who appeared as a playable character in Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Online since 1999!
OpenJazz - An open source version of the original Jazz Jackrabbit game engine, designed to work on Linux and modern Windows systems. Apparently, it is a recreation and the physics are not entirely accurate to the original, so you're probably better off using DOSBox or an older computer to play. Still interesting, however.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Warehouse - A now-defunct website that was one of the most pivotal Jazz Jackrabbit sites around in the 90s, and wound up hosting a number of exclusive interviews with members of the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 development team. It still lives on today thanks to Archive.org.
Chocolate Doom - A multi-platform port of the original DOS Doom executible, focusing on staying as true as possible to the original game. If you do not want to or are unable to run the original Doom in Windows 9x/DOS or in DOSBox, this is probably your best bet for playing the game.
Classic DOOM - Another ancient Doom Web relic that is still alive and kicking. Features walkthroughs and other information for the classic Doom games, in a bare bones yet still quite aesthetically pleasing Web 1.0 format.
Classic DOOM Versions, Ports, and Remakes (for the PC) - A detailed and objective look at all possible options for running Doom in vanilla format, or as close as possible, and all of the positives and drawbacks of each option.
Compet-N - The famous website where Doom speedrunning demos were uploaded and demos were tracked from the late 90s through to 2005. Aside from hosting a trove of old demos and
valuable speedrunning tricks, it also features one of the most delightfully early 2000s designs that still exist on the modern Web. Quoth the website: "Best viewed in 800*600 or more. Netscape and IE tested."
DoomGate.de - A fairly large German-language Doom website.
DOOM Honorific Titles - A primordial (1994!) historical document detailing some titles that were assigned to Doom players who completed various challenges in Doom back when the game had just come out. These titles are notable for the fact that several of them (
Pacifist and Tyson) later became official speedrunning categories when Compet-N came along. Amusingly, the man behind this page, Frank Stajano, is now a professor and this page is still hosted on his official university website, where it is
casually listed in his bibliography alongside his serious academic work.
Doom Humor - A lost treasure trove of Doom-related humour, most of which was written by fans feverishly awaiting awaiting the legendary's game's release back in 1993. The humour is terrific, and the historical value is priceless. Archived on an archive of Lee Killough's website, which lives on an archive of John Romero's old website, which itself is archived on Soulsphere.org (see below for links to Killough's site and Soulsphere.org.)
Doom Underground - Another Doom website that has been abandoned for multiple presidential administrations yet is still somehow hanging on. This one contains detailed reviews on hundreds of old school Doom WADs and has a nice clean and easily readable web 1.0 design. If you're a fan of (early) 90s Doom wads, you're sure to find some gems here.
Doom WAD Station - A staple of the late 90s/early 2000s Doom community that is somehow not only still online, but still being updated. Features a treasure trove of knowledge and WAD reviews for the classic Doom games, the modern Doom games, and even the Wolfenstein and Quake games!
Doom2.net - A truly ancient and fairly large Doom website that has been chugging along mostly unchanged for two decades now. I recently found it again and am pleased to see it's still intact. It contains a lot of good information on Doom, most notably "scientific" analyses of the various monsters, and also hosts a number of good sub-websites.
Doomology - The humourous website of the legendary, equally famous and infamous Doom WAD-maker B.P.R.D., best known as the mad genius behind Equinox, The Mucus Flow (MAP24 of
Community Chest 2), Grove, and Nuts.wad. A must-visit for anyone with any interest in Doom, given that B.P.R.D. is objectively one of the greatest creators to have ever touched the game.
JEZ' Homepage - The personal website of Jez, a very early Danish Doom WAD-maker whose works I greatly enjoyed during my childhood, and still get a kick out of today. None of his work is even remotely special by today's standards, but it carries a very endearing charm of a young nerd gleefully figuring out the whimsical new world of Doom, trying out one crazy idea after another as he went. There are also some non-Doom-related pages, notably a page cataloging obscure 80s/90s Commodore 64 fighting games.
Lee Killough's Website - Archived personal website of a legendary old school Doom sage. Features a plethora of obscure historical and technical information on the game.
M J Doom Page - This website hasn't been updated since the 90s, has a bunch of broken links, and goes down without warning. The reason that I'm including it is largely because it is, in my humble opinion, an example of peak website design. A wonderful image map using Doom episode 3's intermission map as the background, the different MIDIs, background images, and gifs giving every page a distinct theme, the goofy Geocities-esque aesthetics that in no way keeps the site from being easily readable and browseable. This truly is a shining example of how great the web once was.
Page of Doom - While very outdated, this site contains a wealth of Doom-related information, including information on various console versions. There's even an exclusive interview with one of the creators of the obscure Lost Episodes of Doom.
Sir Robin - An old Doom site hosting a good number of WAD reviews. It hasn't been updated in 15 years, but it has a spiffy Web 1.0 design and the reviews are pretty good.
Soulsphere.org - Personal website of Fraggle, one of the people behind the Chocolate Doom source port. Among other things, there are some very interesting Doom-related articles in the Doom Apocrypha section. There's also
unlisted mirrors to
John Romero's old site and
Jim Flynn's website hosted.
The Official DOOM FAQ - A truly ancient and thorough Doom website dating back to the immemorial year of 1994. Although created by a fan named Hank Leukart, it was later included by id Software with official versions of Doom.
The Oldternet - A nostalgic Geocities.ws website designed to mimic the Web 1.0 sites of olde. Features the creator's Doom WADs as well as information on old game consoles and some other cool material.
Wolfendoom - A site hosting a TC (total conversion) for Doom that remakes the Wolfenstein 3D game, as well as a bunch of brand new adventures that take place in the Wolfenstein universe.
Zero Master's YouTube Channel - I try to avoid linking to Web 2.0 stuff like Youtube channels here, but I will make a well-deserved exception here. Zero Master is a jaw-droppingly skilled speedrunner and there are plenty of awe-inspiring feats to be seen here.
see also: DOSBox in the "Programs and Other Computer Related Resources" section below, for playing Doom using the original executable on a system that does not natively support DOS programs. Send Coffee, listed in the "Miscellaneous" section below, also has a Doom section on their website.
BME/ILMHB's Bloody Place - A cornucopia of downloadable modding resources for the classic horror first-person shooter
Blood.
Duke Nukem Repository - A compendium of
Duke Nukem 3D downloads, mainly custom maps and other such modifications.
Ken Silverman's Official Home Page - The personal website of the legendary Ken Silverman, creator of
Ken's Labyrinth and the timeless Build engine, of
Duke Nukem 3D,
Ion Fury,
Blood,
Shadow Warrior,
Witchaven,
Redneck Rampage, etc fame. Featuring loads of information about the legend himself and his various work, all presented in a classical Web 1.0 format. What more could anyone want?!
Rednukem - A source port for the
Redneck Rampage games which stands as the premier way of playing the infamous series. It is possible to get music working using the GOG version of the game using the instructions
later in the thread. It's a tad shaky getting it to work, but worth it to have something to drown out all the incessant streams of broken English vulgarities.
R.T.C.M. - Build Engine and Game Resources - An all-purpose classic Build engine game (meaning almost everything before 2019's
Ion Fury) mega-website, featuring oodles of information both on the beloved legends of the engine as well as the... not-so-beloved, not-so-legendary releases. Aside from the games themselves, the website also hosts a plethora of knowledge about the engine itself. Use the sidebar on the left to navigate.
Shadow Warrior Central - A well-researched and comprehensive
Shadow Warrior website containing all sorts of helpful information about the legendary Build engine game. Hover your mouse over the tiny "more" on the top-left side of the page or you'll miss out on the vast majority of the site's content.
Totally Redneck - A gorgeous fansite for the
Redneck Rampage, including its two expansion packs and bizarre hunting spin-off, including walkthroughs which you'll be quite tempted to rely on if you ever attempt to tackle this infuriatingly labyrinthian and cryptic shooter or its (supposedly less confusing) expansions.
ETTiNGRiNDER's Fortress - A retro gaming site featuring information and downloads for a number of less-appreciated retro classics. Included is a comprehensive shrine for
Witchaven, a levelset for
Monster Bash, levelsets for the original
Duke Nukem, resources and add-ons for the
Heretic/
Hexen series of games, and more!
Monkee's Image World - Probably more of a curiousity than a useful resource. A long-abandoned pile of various custom sprites for
Wolfenstein 3D, including some seriously bizarre ones made from modified sprites from other games. If you're using a browser other than glorious Pale Moon, you may have to manually load preview images in a new window or tab in order to view them.
Old-Games.com - A truly staggering database of reviews of retro and modern computer games, ranging from the mainstream to the utterly obscure. The site features downloads but, as always, it's best to get a copy off of GOG to support the developers if the game is available there instead. Either way, it's one hell of a fantastic resource for finding more good, classic games to play.
The Hunt: Rise of the Triad - An enthusiastic tribute site to
Rise of the Triad, which was perhaps the peak of the grid-based first-person shooter subgenre. Features information on the game's developers including photographs of them during the game's development and what they went on to do afterwards, basic information about the game itself, scans of the game's manual, downloads, and an essay espousing the virtues of the game.
The Wolfenstein 3D Dome - A venerable
Wolfenstein 3D site containing information about every aspect of the game, thorough guides on making your own modifications for it, and enough fan-made levels to more-than-satisfy even the most voracious of grid-based first-person shooter connoisseurs.
Wolfenstein 3D Vault - A very pretty
Wolfenstein 3D featuring everything from basic information to downloads of the manuals and hint books, to modding tutorials and mod downloads, to downloads of various utilities.
256 Color VGA Programming in C - An ancient tutorial on programming graphics for DOS games. An interesting read in spite of how outdated the information is.
3D Realms Legacy Website - Legacy version of the official website of 3D Realms (formerly Apogee,) the company that published and helped create a sizeable chunk (if not the majority) of the best games from the golden age of gaming back in the early 90's. There's a lot of interesting, exclusive information on the development of those old classics to be found here, notably in their legacy interviews series, which can be accessed
here.
A Cup of Joe - The personal blog of Joe Siegler, a pivotal figure in Apogee's history who was responsible for, among other things, extensively testing and helping developers create some of the greatest games in the 90s golden age of gaming.
Adept Software - The classic games section of Adept Software, the creators of Jetpack, Squarez, and God of Thunder. Contains freeware versions of those games as well as beta versions of Jetpack and Squarez, and links to a bunch of fan-made Jetpack level sets.
Blake Stone Maps - Maps of all 66 levels of the DOS first-person shooter game
Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, showing all secret areas, doors, teleporters, switches, barriers, and most importantly, the locations of the dreaded plasma alien spawners.
Catacomb Crypt - An ancient and informative website housing a trove of information about the pioneering Catacomb game franchise, which included one of the most important games in early FPS history.
Digger.org - An adorable Web 1.0 site dedicated to the legendary ancient video game Digger. In addition to a wealth of information about the game, the website also contains an online version of the game that runs in Java, and a remastered version for Windows 95. The remastered version does work well on my Windows 8.1 PC, but I have no idea how well it would fare on Windows 10.
Dman's Game Programming Domain - An abandoned late-90s personal website by an aspiring game programmer. Features small games and programs made by him, as well as historically interesting rants regarding the gaming scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
DOS Haven - A very groovy looking website dedicated to the creation and sharing of modern day DOS games.
DOSGames.com - A groovy website hosting information and downloads of over 1,500 DOS computer games.
eXoDOS - A truly titanic downloadable archive containing virtually every game ever made for DOS. How titanic, you ask? Well, the full-sized torrent stands at 562 gigabytes and contains 7,200 games.
HURL - The one and only (so far as I am aware) website dedicated to the insane children-centric 90s FPS game known as HURL, or Slob Zone 3D.
Maze War Retrospective at Digibarn Computer Museum - Almost all of the historical information you may or may not want to know about Maze War (1973/1974), the very first first-person shooter. There seem to be some issues with the site's SSL certificate at the moment but it loads just fine on my end if I tell the browser to ignore the error.
Mountain King Studios - The official website of the developer that created the legendary games Raptor Call of the Shadows and Demonstar, as well as a few others. Raptor especially is one of my all-time favourite video games. The man behind the Studio is currently working on a Remixed version of Raptor with new levels, new weapons, incredible new graphics, and many other features. Details can be found on the website.
Perilous Crystal Caves - A very good, old website dedicated to the legendary DOS game Crystal Caves. In addition to a wealth of information about the game, the website also features an exclusive multi-part interview with the game's creator Frank Maddin (also the creator of the legendary Monster Bash!) It's an Archive.org link because the original site is unfortunately long gone.
Phil's Wacky Wheels Site - A cute Wacky Wheels site that disappeared years ago but continues to live on via Archive.org. This is the only Wacky Wheels-centric website that I can recall ever seeing, and it contains some pretty useful information about the game.
Puyo Nexus - An invaluable resource for all things related to the Japanese puzzle game Puyo Puyo. Although much if not most of this could perhaps be useless for more seasoned players, as someone who knows no beans about the game, I have been finding it to be a quite useful "bird's eye view" of strategies for playing this pretty and curious old game. :v
Puyo Puyo VS - A freeware Puyo Puyo clone that runs on Linux and Windows and allows you to play against your friends online. The characters need to be downloaded separately but there is a link for that on the downloads page. If you are one whose heart has not been blackened too thoroughly by the ravages of time to still be able to derive some measure of delight from a whimsical children's game such as Puyo Puyo, I would wholeheartedly recommend this resource to you.
Redwood Games - Official website of Redwood Games (Karen Crowther,) the company behind the criminally underrated Pickle Wars.
S&F Prod - An all-purpose early 90s DOS gaming site, containing files and useful information for numerous classic games.
Sega Retro - An awe-inspiring resource dedicated to archiving information on anything and everything related to Sega. Has just short of 30,000 articles as of this writing!
Shikadi.net - A fairly large website that, among other things, hosts a number of Commander Keen fansites and an entire community dedicating to finding ways to mod video games from the early 90s golden era of Apogee and Epic MegaGames.
Sonic Retro - A Sonic the Hedgehog fan site containing an immense trove of information on all things Sonic the Hedgehog-related. From the same people responsible for Sega Retro.
The Apogee FAQ - A vast FAQ on all things related to Apogee/3D Realms and the many classic computer games that they put out. While the FAQ was actually created by Rinkworks, it contains numerous contributions by Apogee and has been "officialised" by them.
The Spriters Resource - A rich vault of sprites and textures ripped from countless, mostly older games. If you want to use a game's resources for a personal project or just want to appreciate the art files, this is usually the first and best place to look.
Dark Forces Mods and Maps - A vast fansite for
Star Wars Dark Forces, the game that birthed the illustrious
Dark Forces/
Jedi Knight series. Whether you're new to the game and seeking to learn the basics, or a veteran player yearning to learn more about the game or download and play some modifications, this site should have you covered.
JKDF2.NET - Tons of resources related to
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and its expansion pack
Mysteries of the Sith, including mods, and, more importantly,
a lofty archive featuring rare and exclusive development information such as developer interviews, magazine articles, beta screenshots, and concept art.
The Massassi Temple - A repository of knowledge and resources primarily for modding
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and its expansion pack
Mysteries of the Sith. The site's been around for forever and still features a full archive of its news updates dating back to 2000.
Duke Nukem Forever Museum - The definitive resource on all things related to the troubled 14 year development of the infamous
Duke Nukem Forever. Promotional screenshots, concept art, footage, audio clips, interviews, development documents, press releases, and even an old leaked build of the game! Most artefacts are even sorted in chronological order by year.
Quake3World - A
Quake III fansite featuring a useful introductory guide to all aspects of the game, and a (sadly moribund) forum.
Standing Stones - A classical fansite for the cult classic first-person shooter
Clive Barker's Undying, featuring everything you may have wanted to know about the game.
The Duke Nukem Forever List - A comical list of all the various things that have transpired between the start of the infamous
Duke Nukem Forever's development and its untimely demise in 2009. Just to put its notorious development time into perspective.
Garfield Postcards - A collection of ultra-obscure, high-quality Garfield postcards on an otherwise derelict and Garfield-unrelated website. If the design doesn't tip you off about the site's age, the fact that they imply that Garfield still has a real official website should.
Lasagna.cz - A cute little Garfield that allows you to search for Garfield comic strips via the website's personal database of transcribed comics.
Petr Zika's Garfield Archive - A bloat-free and easy to use method of quickly reading the Garfield comics. A script running on the webmaster's computer automatically pulls comics as they come out and slaps them on bare bones Web 1.0 pages which are sorted by month and year.
Random Garfield Generator - A web application that generates new Garfield comics by arbitrarily splicing together panels from existing comics. Downright astounding how often the results seem to at least vaguely make sense.
The Gramfel Cycle - A morose and nihilistic webcomic parodying Garfield made by
an artist known as Nellucnhoj, and one of the progenitors of the Eldritch Garfield phenomenon. The ending hits like a speeding mack truck made of depression.
What the Internet Did to Garfield - A riveting in-depth look at the evolution of the Garfield fandom, and exactly how and why an ultra-"safe" cartoon cat designed for Sunday newspaper comics and cute merchandise slowly morphed into a macabre eldritch horror in the hands of its fans. A fascinating watch even for people without any interest in Garfield, I daresay.
Gods and Monsters - A pretty large collection of mythology from everything from ancient deities, to fairies, to vampires. Nice Web 1.0-ish design too.
Real Vampires Website - Another weird web 1.0 website, this time about purported real life vampires.
TeenWitch - A large and pretty old resource for all things witchy. I don't know enough about witchcraft to say how accurate this is, but it's a large informative Web 1.0 website so I'm putting it here for anyone that may need it.
Wired Sage's Learning - An interesting website dedicated to teaching one how to interact with a variety of supernatural beings.
The Shadowlands - A truly venerable ancient (since 1994!) Web 1.0 site hosting a wealth of knowledge and anecdotes on various paranormal phenomenon, as well as tributes to the deceased pets of the webmaster and webmistress.
Everything You Need to Know About Vampires - A handy compilation of information related to vampire mythology.
DagonBytes - A truly fantastic gothic-centric site featuring everything from full online copies of classic gothic horror literature such as Carmilla, Dracula, and Frankenstein, to cemetery listings, to an interview with Michael Myers' actor from Halloween H20. Even if the subject matter is not your forte, this is a brilliant gem that you won't want to miss out on.
Make sure you have Flash enabled so that you don't miss the glorious introduction animations!!!
The Global Consciousness Project - A Princeton website attempting to track the Noosphere (collective conscious) by using quantum tunneling-based random number generators and observing when the RNGs inexplicably become structured, and how this lines up with dramatic human events.
- The resurrection of an old 2000s imageboard, now hosted and led by my friends lolwut and Comatoast.
Anon Cafe - A comfy, alternative imageboard with less censorship and more intellectual discussion than 4chan. Not anywhere near as active however. Feels like one of the forums of the old web.
Boards.ie - An Irish forum dating back to the year 2000, that is somehow still active. A very interesting time capsule on how people online reacted to historical events such as
the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
B3TA - A two-decade old British message board with a penchant for creating comedic images.
Gab - A popular and rapidly growing social media that is free of censorship and the oppressive yoke of big technology companies. If you like the idea of twitter but are disheartened by the childish level of discourse there, you'll love Gab.
- An imageboard that seeks to emulate ~2004 era 4chan, with an emphasis on nostalgia, laidback fun, and creative original content, and a strong stance against political crap along with new-fangled cancerous phenomena such as wojaks, pepes, and various zoomer slang.
At Home with English - Oblivion NPCs - A wholesome 1980s English language tutorial video with background music from the Bethesda RPG
Oblivion playing in the background and the game's UI overlayed, creating an equally surreal and hilarious experience that is impossible to not love.
Malbolge - Some information about Malbolge, Malbolge Unshackled, and Dis - three diabolically evil and nearly impossible to use esoteric programming languages.
MY SUMMER CAR Official Site - The militantly 90s-esque official website of the eccentric (and occasionally drunken) Finnish indie vehicle simulation game My Summer Car.
The Library of Babel - Not to be confused with
my own Library of Babel, this website is a genius attempt at digitally recreating the Library of Babel thought up by Jorge Luis Borges. Although there is almost certainly no chance of you ever encountering anything remotely coherent on there, this website theoretically contains every book that will ever be written, as well as accurate predictions for how every single person in the world will die.
Modern Drunkard - An entertaining online publication aimed at alcoholics.
Bonequest - Formerly named Jerkcity, this is a extremely long-running and exceptionally bizarre webcomic that will sate all of the "Microsoft Comic Chat characters screaming at each other about cocks and diarrhea for eternity" needs that you had no idea that you had until you started reading it.
Zombo Com - An interesting little Flash website that has been around for approximately all of eternity. Welcome to Zombo Com!
St. Sanders' Shred Depository - Website of the infamous St. Sanders, and his shred parody videos. Personally I recommend the one that he did for the Rolling Stones the most, but the majority of his work is excellent.
The Draconcat - An old and stylish Web 1.0 website by someone claiming to be a cat inside of a human body (a state of being that I personally sympathise with very well.) This is the weird kind of site that makes the internet worth it to me.
Nothing - A Web 1.0 website dedicated to the enigmatic concept of nothing.
The Anti-Social Primer - An overly goofy guide to becoming a sociopath. Probably not a good idea to take this one too seriously.
Drink and Drive - A very... unique website that espouses the joys of drunk driving. I am including this for the humour value and the web 1.0 design, and do not intend this to be a statement of support for the practice.
Neil's Pennsylvania Home Page - A warm and charming personal website including everything from Pennsylvania history to roadkill recipes, to an extensive humour section featuring a number of satirical causes including Drunks Against Mad Mothers, and a humourously convincing campaign to outlaw bread.
Horace 'Kicker' Vallas - A very friendly elderly man's website, announcing his retirement and displaying some photographs of him, his family/relatives/friends, and his dogs. Not much content here, but the authentic and friendly vibe of the site is so reminiscent of the good old 90s Web that my heart would not allow me to not include a link to it.
The End of the Internet - The last page of the Internet, if you're tired of exploring the World Wide Web and just want to see what's at the end already.
Bash.org - A database of humourous IRC/AIM/MSN quotes that was quite popular at the start of the 2000s, and now stands as a glorious time capsule of
old IRC culture and humour.
Hope Of The Future - A work-in-progress
Terminator fansite. Some of the pages are missing, but the extremely extensive "Deleted Scenes" page makes this one worth a visit, if nothing else.
My 90's TV! - A fancy online CRT television that plays short clips of various shows, movies, advertisements, and so forth that aired on the 90s and is operated via television and remote control buttons. Don't expect to be able to vegetate away to it like real 90s era cable, but it's good for short bursts of nostalgia. There's also 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 2000s versions linked to on the page. It's rather finicky so be prepared to try it on multiple browsers if it doesn't work on your first one.
PizzaMaking.com - A cute website for pizza enthusiasts, featuring resources such as a glossary, a forum, book reviews, and (of course) recipes for such authentic Italian classics such as Chicago deep dish pepperoni pizza and New York style pizza.
The Other Pages - Charming site that contains staggering collections of poetry and quotations, along with photographs and other creative works.
Badmovies.org - A movie reviews website that specialises in b-movies. If you're a connoisseur of low-budget movies about Satan-possessed hands, killer alien tomatoes, two-headed sharks, and alien eyeball monsters, you will surely find something you love here.
The Cutting Room Floor - A massive rabbit hole of a wiki cataloguing content that was scrapped from thousands of games. If you're ever curious about what sorts of interesting things didn't make it into the released version of your favourite games.
DragonBear - A genuine Web 1.0 (first put up in 1999!) Medieval-centric website featuring articles on medieval history, free web graphics, cross-stitch and needlework patterns, and some medieval recipes.
First Versions - As the title says, explore the original iterations of select video games, websites, cars, albums, and so on.
icefairy.org - A cute little Web 1.0 site dedicated to Cirno, the mighty ice faerie from Touhou. Do yourself a favour and do "select all" to read the text on the "All About Cirno" pages and "Links" pages, as that's the only way you can read white text on a grey background.
Omniglot - A colossal repository of virtually all the writing systems and languages in the world. Everything from alphabets to phrases to advice on learning new languages is catalogued here.
The Visual Novels Database - A 2000s-aesthetic database for information about visual novels.
Home page of Jarkko Oikarinen - The authentically old school personal website of Jarkko Oikarinen, the man who invented Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
SpaceHey - A dedicated remake of the good old social media website Myspace. So far as I can tell, it's closer to the original feel of Myspace and has an overall older audience.
FriendProject - Another remake of Myspace. This one seems to have a significantly younger audience that drifted in from TikTok.
Atomic Rockets - A colossal and detailed website dedicated to analysing popular science fiction concepts from the lens of actual science.
Internet Movie Firearms Database - A comprehensive database cataloguing just what firearms were used and shown in various movies and games.
James Cameron Online - A sprawling website dedicated to archiving information on the many projects of famous filmmaker James Cameron, the man responsible for
Terminator,
Terminator 2, and a number of less important movies.
The Terminator 2 FAQ is my personal favourite part of the site.
Swedish Recipes - A very cute little website dedicated to holding recipes for Swedish cuisine.
Everything Shii Knows - An ancient archived personal wiki written by Shii, a moderator from 4chan's earliest days, containing his writings on a myriad of subjects from 2006 to 2010. I most certainly do not agree with everything that the author wrote, but this is quite a valuable historical Internet resource nonetheless.
PesterChum - A very eccentric chat client apparently based on the Homestuck webcomic. Although ultimately just a goofy IRC client primarily designed for use on a single server, PesterChum provides a number of unique features such as RGB colour options for text, moods, randomly messaging other users on the network, a buddy list, and so on. Most people on the network are oddball Homestuck roleplayers so it is not exactly the easiest place to make friends, but I admire the comfy layout (notably the Windows 95 theme), and any niche community that makes an active effort to scare off NORPs is a winrar in my book.
Kat's Korner - A glorious and comfy Web 1.0 sanctum organised in the form of a house, with each room containing numerous subsections covering a myriad of topics. Although the design of the website is far from the fanciest, you would be hard-pressed to find many websites that have a more pleasing and genuine Web 1.0 feel than this gem does.
Erowid - An incredibly useful resource containing a wealth of information about various legal and illegal drugs, from numerous personal anecdotes to scientific information.
Totse - A massive collection of text files from the older days of the Web, many featuring controversial and/or illegal content. A shining example of pure old Web anarchy, both for better and for worse.
Dissolved Girl - The incredibly depressing Neocities website of Sol Pais, an 18 year old woman who committed suicide near Columbine High School. A very painful yet fascinating look at crippling depression at its worst.
Wayne's This and That - An absolutely
vast Web 1.0 personal website hosting more things than I care to even list here. Whether you're looking for some genuinely amusing jokes, want to try some new recipes, want to know how to build a telescope, or simply enjoy reading the thoughts of an educated and amusing older man, you're guaranteed to find something of interest here.
GOTH ZONE - A superbly designed Goth-themed Neocities site designed to feel as if one is exploring an interactive castle. Very unique and creative.
Sisters of Mercy's Website - The official website of the goth rock band Sisters of Mercy. They are one of my favourite bands, but the main reason that I'm including this link is because the website is an authentic web 1.0 site that was made by the band's singer Andrew Eldritch himself, and it shows. Some of the content on there is absolutely hilarious.
Lost All Hope - An actually open-minded website about suicide that isn't just some version of the usual "suicide hotline" copypasta that you get on every other website about the topic.
Project Gutenberg - An online library where you can download free copies of tens of thousands of books whose copyright has expired.
- A Neocities website that contains a treasure trove of gifs and other images.
MashTea Gholee CyberTeaHouse - A very cute website dedicated to information about tea. It's apparently a just a section of the larger
Farsinet website - a website dedicated to the Persian and Farsi-speaking Christian community.
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Official website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society in Poe's home city of Baltimore. It features an online archive of his work - including letters and other obscure writings - as well as various information about the legendary horror writer.
House of Usher - A primeval Edgar Allan Poe fansite that hosts an archive of adaptations and other works that reference Poe's stories. Sadly, the last update was back in 2011 and states that the website is being abandoned in favour of new media such as social media and blogs. Makes one want to barf up a hairball in disgust.
Anti-Sex - A website decrying the negative effects of sex and pornography and urging abstinence from such practices. They have a Russian language website as well, which can be found
here.
Medieval Recipes - A comprehensive guide to food recipes and eating habits of medieval Europe, if you've ever wondered what it would be like to eat food similiar to what people ate centuries ago.
Bright Eyes - A Neocities website that actually consists of 5 totally separate websites dedicated to several works of fiction, arts 'n' crafts, and an overall personal site. While a lot of the content doesn't seem to be up yet, all five pages already have some very cozy and aesthetic designs set up.
Sunrise Sunset Calendars - An extremely thorough and helpful website for looking up what time the sun is slated to rise or set, anywhere, on any date. Solid Web 1.0 design too.
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive - A vast archive cataloguing the writings and legacy of the legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
Wildwood Survival - A large site dedicated to wilderness survival skill information. A lot of very useful information that you never know if you'll need to use one day.
Useful Tropical Plants - A sprawling database of over 10,000 tropical plant species and their many uses.
Glorious Trainwrecks - A community dedicated to creating and sharing indie games with a focus on creating for the fun of creation, and not about production values or quality.
Windows 95 Tips - A short blog by the legendary Neil Cicierga that consists of screenshots from what appears to be a copy of Windows 95 that has been possessed by some sort of eldritch abomination. Creepy and hilarious in equal measure, and well worth a read or two.
Windows 93 - An incredible website that mimics an imaginary version of Windows existing between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. It features a VERY funky design, and comes with, among many other things, fully playable versions of Solitaire and Minesweeper! A side-note on the latter: the Minesweeper version is intended to be entirely unplayable unless you disable "troll mode" on it.
RinkWorks - A truly vast old school website featuring a staggering amount of comedic material, online games, and other entertainment.
wttr.in - A weather website that, in contrast to the bloated and advertisement-saturated mainstream weather websites, gives you all of the information that you need in a cute and conservative format resembling a command prompt. Sadly, you can only receive the weather in the location your IP address is in, so it's not very useful for those of us who habitually use VPNs and/or Tor.
Bad Designs - A genuine Web 1.0 scrapbook of various stupidly designed objects.
Urban Adventures in Rotterdam - Urban exploration photography of various locations in Rotterdam, UK, and other places in Europe.
Contemplations From the Marianas Trench - A collection of insightful and amusing contemplations, presaented with a cool minimalist ocean-themed Web 1.0 look.
Send Coffee - A comfy 1996 website featuring a number of amusing pages. Of highlight is the Doom page, and a section wistfully talking about how much better Windows 3.1 was than its successors of the Windows 9x group. As a
die-hard Windows 98 obsessive, it amuises me to see that this cycle has truly been occurring since time immemorial.
Obsolete Computer Museum - An online museum featuring photographs and information on various ancient computers.
Encyclopaedia Metallum - A surprisingly exhaustive collection of information on metal bands organised by country and sub-genre.
The Meditative Cat - A 1996 cat-themed website with the exact kind of adorable aesthetics you would expect for something from that era.
The Cephalopod Page - An impressive website containing a wealth of information on cephalopods (octopuses, squid, etc) put together by a Ph.D Marine Biologist. The website has been up since 1995 and is still being maintained.
RussianSpaceWeb - A two-decade old website documenting Russian and Soviet space exploration history from its beginnings to the present.
Moose Creek Nike Site - A website that aims to preserve the lives, work, and memories of the people who served at Site Tare in Moose Creek, Alaska to protect the United States from a missile attack during the Cold War. Make sure you have Flash enabled in order to view the photography albums on this site.
TheAlmightyGuru - A sprawling early 2000s website on all sorts of topics. The content is quite hit-or-miss (usually miss) but I'll leave a link here purely due to the sheer size and age of the website.
Jerry Lehr - A personal website covering everything from Doom to Mario to the author's personal music projects. Notable for being the only Neocities website that (to my knowledge)
has a Commander Keen page.
The Devil's Dictionary - Online version of the Devil's Dictionary - a famous satirical dictionary created over the course of several decades by U.S. Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce. Some of the definitions (I quite like the ones for "mad", "arrest", "friendless", "slang", and "polite" especially) are truly incredible.
KOTOKO - Official website of the J-Pop legend KOTOKO.
Icebike Home Page - An old and defunct website dedicated to the art of cycling in snowy and icy conditions.
Weather Spark - A weather website that allows you to look up historical climate trends anywhere in the world. Quite a mood-lifter if you're looking for the exact location of the light at the end of the tunnel of an infernal summer, if nothing else.
The Antarctic Circle - A comprehensibe Web 1.0 compilation of information on all things pertaining to the majestic continent of Antarctica.
LittleSis - A database of famous and powerful people and organisations, and their affiliations and relations with each other.
The Babylon Bee - A conservative, Christian satire news website and a wonderful alternative to The Onion. I wouldn't say it's better than The Onion was at its peak, but it's probably the most entertaining such website around today (to my knowledge.)
Genesius Times - Another conservative, Christian satire news site like Babylon Bee. This one seems to be even more political than the Bee but very entertaining nonetheless.
The Gateway Pundit - An excellent right-leaning news website.
Breitbart - A fairly high quality news website that tends to avoid bias and lying more than just about any big U.S.-based news source. Just avoid the comments sections if you don't want to risk getting an aneurysm.
Russia Today - Another great news website that reports many things that the leftist U.S. mainstream media refuses to.
BitChute - A censorship-free YouTube alternative that contains a lot of terrific, informative content that would not have survived on YouTube due to their anti-free speech policies. Lots of redpilled content.
Canada Free Press - An independent conservative news site with a focus on North American affairs. This one is relatively new to me but is one that I wholeheartedly recommend nonetheless.
Pravda - The English version of an ancient esteemed Russian newspaper, named after the Russian word for "truth".
PressTV - An Iranian news website offering many unique viewpoints.