hey,
i'm b0zy, computer engineer, online since 1998. dial-up at home, 14.4k modem then 33.6k then the magical 56k. ttnet billed by the minute back then so i remember planning every download.
last week i made https://rip.so - a memorial site for the dead corners of the internet. each grave is a 800-1200 word obit for something i either used (icq, msn, mp3.com, kazaa) or remember from the era (geocities, friendster, sodaplay). 100+ entries plus a small companion list called "things that survived against odds" (vlc, irc, wikipedia, slashdot).
the writing is in my own voice. when i never used something i say so directly: "i never used path. it was a US-focused product, by 2010 the social network audience in turkey had settled on facebook." honesty about distance matters more than pretending to know things i did not.
it went viral on hacker news on 29 april (~30k pageviews in a day). the early version shipped with AI-generated placeholder content that i rewrote by hand after HN ripped it apart. that critique was the right call. the rewrite was the part that made it real.
other small things:
- you can leave a rose on any grave (anonymous ASCII tribute, IRC-color)
- atom feed of recent burials
- weekly digest newsletter (opt-in)
- suggestion box if you remember something missing
a few things people brought back via the suggestion box that surprised me:
- sodaplay (the flash physics toy with the spring creatures)
- nabaztag (the french wifi rabbit)
- swatch beat-time (the 1998 attempt to replace timezones with ubeats)
- the palace (the 1995 graphical chat)
- origami flowers (a niche android flower-growing MMO that died in 2017)
comments and rose tributes welcome.