The Internet We Didn’t Get

October 2, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth, and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places.

The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was hypertext with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was transclusion, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.

Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others.

Wayback Proxy Lets Your Browser Party Like It’s 1999

May 26, 2025 by Tyler August 14 Comments

This project is a few years old, but it might be appropriate to cover it late since [richardg867]’s Wayback Proxy is, quite literally, timeless.

It does, more-or-less, what it says as on the tin: it is an HTTP proxy that retrieves pages from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, or the Oocities archive of old Geocities sites. (Remember Geocities?) It is meant to sit on a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC between you and the modern internet. A line in a config file lets you specify the exact date. We found this via YouTube in a video by [The Science Elf] (embedded below, for those of you who don’t despise YouTube) in which he attaches a small screen and dial to his Pi to create what he calls the “Internet Time Machine” using the Wayback Proxy. (Sadly [The Science Elf] did not see fit to share his work, but it would not be difficult to recreate the python script that edits config.json.)

What’s the point? Well, if you have a retro-computer from the late 90s or early 2000s, you’re missing out a key part of the vintage experience without access to the vintage internet. This was the era when desktops were being advertised as made to get you “Online”. Using Wayback Proxy lets you relive those halcyon days– or live them for the first time, for the younger set. At least relive those of which parts of the old internet which could be Archived, which sadly isn’t everything. Still, for a nostalgia trip, or a living history exhibit to show the kids? It sounds delightful.

Of course it is possible to hit up the modern web on a retro PC (or on a Mac Plus). As long as you’re not caught up in an internet outage, as this author recently was.

Continue reading “Wayback Proxy Lets Your Browser Party Like It’s 1999” →

What Happened To WWW.?

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 59 Comments

Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with those three letters that once defined the internet.

Have you ever wondered why those letters were there in the first place, and when exactly they became optional? Let’s dig into the archaeology of the early web and trace how this ubiquitous prefix went from essential to obsolete.

Where Did You Go?

*The first website didn’t bother with any of that www. nonsense! Credit: author screenshot*

It may shock you to find out that the “www.” prefix was actually never really a key feature or necessity at all. To understand why, we need only contemplate the very first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990. Running on a NeXT workstation employed as a server, the site could be accessed at a simple URL: “http//info.cern.ch/”—no WWW needed. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and called it as such, but he hadn’t included the prefix in his URL at all. So where did it come from? Continue reading “What Happened To WWW.?” →

Dillo Turns 25, And Releases A New Version

January 19, 2025 by Jenny List 13 Comments

The chances are overwhelming, that you are reading this article on a web browser powered by some form of the Blink or WebKit browser engines as used by Google, Apple, and many open source projects, or perhaps the Gecko engine as used by Firefox. At the top end of the web browser world there are now depressingly few maintained browser engines — we think to the detriment of web standards evolution.

Moving away from the big players though, there are several small browser projects which eschew bells and whistles for speed and compactness, and we’re pleased to see that one of the perennial players has released a new version as it passes its quarter century.

Dillo describes itself as ” a fast and small graphical web browser”, and it provides a basic window on the web with a tiny download and the ability to run on very low-end hardware. Without JavaScript and other luxuries it sometimes doesn’t render a site as you’d see it in Chrome or Firefox, but we’re guessing many users would relish some escape from the web’s cycle-sucking garbage. The new version 3.2.0 brings bug fixes, as well as math formula rendering, and navigation improvements.

The special thing about Dillo is that this is a project which came back from the dead. We reported last year how a developer resurrected it after a previous release back in 2015, and it seems that for now at least it has a healthy future. So put it on your retro PC, your original Raspberry Pi, or your Atari if you have one, and try it on your modern desktop if you need reminding just how fast web browsing can be.

This isn’t the only interesting browser project on the block, we’re also keeping an eye on Ladybird, which is aiming for those big players rather than simplicity like Dillo.

Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip.

The World Of Web Browsers Is In A Bad Way

January 4, 2024 by Jenny List 115 Comments

There once was a man who invented a means for publishing scientific documents using hypertext. He made his first documents available from his NeXT cube, and a lot of the academics who saw them thought it was a great idea. They took the idea, expanded it, and added graphics, and pretty soon people who weren’t scientists wanted to use it too. It became the Next Big Thing, and technology companies new and old wanted a piece of the pie.

You all know the next chapter of this story. It’s the mid 1990s, and Microsoft, having been caught on the back foot after pursuing The Microsoft Network as a Compuserve and AOL competitor, did an about-turn and set out to conquer the Web. Their tool of choice was Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, which since it shipped with Windows 95 and every computer that mattered back then came with Windows 95, promptly entered a huge battle with Netscape’s Navigator browser. Web standards were in their infancy so the two browsers battled each other by manipulating the underlying technologies on which the Web relied. Microsoft used their “Embrace and extend” strategy to try to Redmondify everything, and Netscape got lost in the wilderness with Netscape 4, a browser on which nightmarish quirks were the norm. By the millennium it was Internet Explorer that had won the battle, and though some of the more proprietary Microsoft web technologies had fallen by the wayside, we entered the new decade in a relative monoculture. Continue reading “The World Of Web Browsers Is In A Bad Way” →

The Gopher Revival Is Upon Us

December 29, 2023 by Jenny List 39 Comments

A maxim for anyone writing a web page in the mid 1990s was that it was good practice to bring the whole thing (including graphics) in at around 30 kB in size. It was a time when the protocol still had some pretence of efficient information delivery, when information was self-published, before huge corporations brought everything under their umbrellas.

Recently, this idea of the small web has been experiencing something of a quiet comeback. [Serge Zaitsev]’s essay takes us back to a time before the Internet as we know it was born, and reminds us of a few protocols that have fallen by the wayside. Finger or Gopher, both things we remember from our student days, but neither of which was a match for the browser.

All is not lost though, because the Gemini protocol is a more modern take on minimalist Internet information sharing. It’s something like the web, but intentionally without the layer upon layer of extraneous stuff, and it’s been slowly gathering some steam. Every time we look at its software list it becomes more extensive, and we live in hope that it might catch on for use with internet-connected microcontroller-based computing. The essay is a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to be the web, and doesn’t have to be bloated either.

Virtual Yule Log Brings Old Tradition To The Web

December 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Yule Log broadcasts are a bit of an American tradition, though similar content has also been broadcast around the world. They consist of a video of a log burning in a fireplace, ideally merrily so, and often feature Christmas carols or other holiday songs to help create a festive mood. [Joshua Gross] wanted to bring that tradition up to date, and thus built a Yule Log website with the help of some creative technologists.

WebYuleLog.com, as the project is known, features several web-based recreations of the Yule Log concept. They are charming little creations built with different techniques, from the AI-generated to those hewn from simple, pure HTML and CSS. They range from cute 8-bit-esque tributes to burning firewood, to the ethereal and unrecognizable thought bubbles of an image-generating neural network. We’re pretty sure one of them is a oblique reference to an old Excel 97 Easter Egg, too.

It’s funny how much can be achieved within a modern browser window. Once upon a time, you were lucky to get a few GIFs and an obnoxious looping MIDI soundtrack.