Noteworthy websites

This is a collection of sites that I find inspiring, interesting, cool, and perhaps most importantly, capture the free spirit of the old internet that I want to preserve.

We miss out on so much by gravitating toward just a handful of big websites and apps that try their hardest to meet every need we could possibly have in an increasingly desperate attempt to convert our attention into shareholder value. We trade creativity and personality for sterile predictability and convenience.

I will try to keep this list updated as I find more.

Aurora

This is a site created to visualize the social relationships between users on Bluesky. The author, Joel Gustafson, even made a whole write-up on the process and iterations of making it.

The Fighters Generation

A site dedicated to indexing and preserving the history of fighting games and their art. I’m not even that into fighting games — I play Street Fighter 6 occasionally and I am very bad at it — but because of this site, I have an appreciation for the genre and art styles that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Ruud Helderman

Ruud Helderman is someone I stumbled upon while learning C, he has a very good and thorough walkthrough of programming a text-based adventure game in C from scratch. His site is a collection of really interesting projects, most of which are visual and/or interactive.

The Telecom Archive

A big archive of historical telecom-related documents, engineering drawings, standards and so much more. I have actually used documents from this site at work as a reference to write network standards and policies.

I love the last question in the FAQ because I feel it perfectly captures what I love about all these sites:

What software does this website run on?

This is really barebones. All of the HTML is generated by about 100 lines of perl script that I wrote, and a lot of that is the HTML headers and formatting tags. It takes input from a spreadsheet I keep locally with all of this information. It’s really basic. So keep that in mind if you want to complain about the layout or lack of features! :-)

Even the boring simplicity of an archive presented as nothing more than a collection of blue links on a white page reveals the inspiring passion and dedication of its maintainer.

typewritten software

This site, from what I can tell, is dedicated to indexing and preserving documentation relating to early computers and software. Someone linked to the media vault on a Twitter thread about old software user interfaces and I found the whole site very interesting with its large scope and relative simplicity.

Macintosh Repository

A huge repository of software for Macintosh computers dating all the way back to 1978. Projects like this are so important.