social.outsourcedmath.com
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
Remember when homepages used to add snowflakes falling during the winter season? Modern web is too boring.
Link to source
Dusk To Don :raccoon:
Dusk To Don :raccoon: • mastodon (AP)
Agreed.

*wistful sigh*

At least we can still resize unstyled <textarea> to our hearts' content. :blobcathyper:

Hat tip to the brilliant @mcc for this WILD tale of the early days . . .

https://cohost.org/mcc/post/325362-a-one-person-oral-hi

#webDev #earlyWeb #geoCities
#webdev #geocities #earlyweb @mcc
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
thanks for sharing the memoirs! It reminded me of my own experience with the Russian version of this, called Narod ("the people"), running a similar service from 2000 to 2009. It had no wonky chat, though, just good old guestbooks
Link to source
atsuko
atsuko • mastodon (AP)
@dusk @mcc there were less known but somewhat cooler ways to get your web-page running:

coordinating center for the geoTLD (ripn) had option to register free domain in one of the free zones (.pp.ru, .com.ru, .org.ru)

also, some hosting companies had free tiers to host a website on your own domain (usually for ads)
@mcc @Dusk To Don :raccoon:
Link to source
mcc
mcc • mastodon (AP)
@dusk that is very interesting to hear about
@Dusk To Don :raccoon:
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
@mcc RuNet was a very interesting place, lagging behind the UsNet due to high popularity of FidoNet. The events of the Soviets falling were translated over FidoNet as one of the first-party news source! The www part of RuNet was incredibly fragmented at the end of the 90s still, perhaps because an average web admin had to support three versions of a website: Unix version with KOI-8 for Cyrillic, MacOS version with MacCyrillic, and Windows CP1251. Some would also host at least one more version, for example DOS/Arachne with CP866. Most websites had a splash page on the main allowing to select the encoding!
Then Yandex has happened in 1997, bringing Russian language search to the web (your search engine must understand Russian grammar to search Russian texts, otherwise you'll miss "оптовый склад зелёного горошка" while you're looking for "зелёный горошек купить оптом дёшево Саратов"). Circa 2000 they started offering 5MB of pure static hosting+a guestbook for free. That spawned endless communities!
@mcc
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
then somewhere around early 00s the Fido finally started to see an exodus of people to www - no doubt, thanks to free mail at mail.ru and free blogs at LiveJournal. Fido had a bit of resurgence around 2007, but it mostly stopped being active at all by 2015.
Curiously, Russians have avoided the Facebook curse, and instead embraced an embarrassment of a social network called Classmates. Older generations to this day prefer it to a hip Facebook clone you likely heard of, called VK, that is #1 Russian social network. The reason is it offers WordArt style stickers with glitter!
A screenshot from the internet showing the interface of a major Russian social network called Odnoklassniki, with wordart and glitter stickers
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
@yottatsa as an early-ish web hoster and long time runet user, do you remember any more fun stuff about the early Russian segment of www?

@mcc
@mcc @atsuko
Link to source
atsuko
atsuko • mastodon (AP)
@mcc one of the coolest internet software projects from my hometown was NetProjectJournal: sort of a wiki + blog + forum, with federated feed and remote identities, see https://en.everybodywiki.com/Net_Project_Journal

Net Project Journal - EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki

Search Net Project Journal on Amazon. NPJ (Net Project Journal Software) - open source CMS software distributed under the GNU GPL. Written in PHP, uses MySQL database...
EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki
@mcc
Link to source
atsuko
atsuko • mastodon (AP)
@mcc the most notable thing i remember is the broadband network hyper-locality, even around late 2000s

most of the networks in my hometown were growing out of large LAN, all of them were ethernet/Cat5-based, IX weren’t fast, and uplinks even to the rest of the country were scarce and expensive

as a result, lots of media were pirated on countless local shares and ftps, and there was a huge market for infra-city CSPs (e.g. as44128 i was working for)
@mcc
Link to source
atsuko
atsuko • mastodon (AP)
ADSL was not widespread because of very old POTS infra, and i only got one because my parents home was a new-built, and was connected to a “brand-new” digital exchange. it was mostly a thing only in moscow

also, BRAS/PPPoE wasn’t widespread in those huge LANs, as the big-iron was prohibitively expensive. most of the traffic was routed with home-grown BSD boxes, and ISPs were inventing their ways to authenticate users in the network
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
@yottatsa @mcc There is a memoir post from 2021 by someone on a Russian IT blog platform https://habr.com/ru/companies/macloud/articles/552168/ and it has some cool trivia:

> In Runet since 1996 there was a portal Halyava.ru, where it was possible to place a home page of no more than 512 kilobytes. FAQ said:

>> Why do you need more? If your page begins to weigh more than 512 kilobytes, the question arises: why make such ‘heavy’ graphics?

> The company offered an address like www.halyava.ru/ваше-имя, and overloaded the page with advertisements. In fact, the user's site was displayed in an embedded frame, at the top of which the hoster unrolled banners and placed a link to its own service. It is noteworthy that at first Halyava.ru did not have the ability to upload web pages via FTP: instead, the data was transmitted to the server via e-mail, and instructions were sent to the user via e-mail.

> The page lived on Halyava for two months after the server received the last command from the user, and then disappeared without a trace.
@mcc @atsuko
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
@yottatsa @mcc

continued:

> The most popular web services at the time were guestbooks and chat rooms, and the most common language used to write CGI scripts was Perl.

> Access to DBs on free plans was also, understandably, absent as a phenomenon, data was written to text files, which were used instead of a database. Archaic, but the chat on Perl and .TXT safely existed on my site, I think, until 2002, when it was abolished for lack of need.

> Many people at that time rightly thought that there was no money in Runet. I and a couple of my mates made sites for American customers, mainly for small and super-small businesses. In the States, such services were expensive at the time, in Russia - an order of magnitude cheaper. I remember how I was completely stunned by a question from a gentleman from Texas, how many dollars is an hour of work in Russia webmaster. The hell I knew! In Russia in the late 90's people usually were paid for a completed project, and not always. Some students worked for a beer.
@mcc @atsuko
Link to source
Nina Kalinina
Nina Kalinina • mastodon (AP)
@yottatsa @mcc

Comments section is a trove of memories, too:

> aik:
>> In 1997, our city (small) sat on satellite channel 64 plus a backup modem for 28. In 98 the satellite was expanded to 128, and somewhere in 2000 we got a radio relay for 4 megabits

> aik
>> There was a citywide "ezernet" network, and everything big came to that network on hard drives and then got leaked by someone. This went on, probably, somewhere until the end of the noughties - because the first "unlimiteds" were pretty skinny and it took a long time to download some TV show from the nets.

This does confirm the theory of hyper-local networks!
@mcc @atsuko
Link to source

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