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10 forgotten websites that everybody visited at least once

25/10/2017

41 Comments

 
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Are you old enough to remember when the Internet was a new thing, rather than a ubiquitous part of life? I mean, how the hell did we live without it? Imagine a typical day for you. Now remove the Internet from it, and try not to have a panic attack.

Of course, it took a while for it to become the all-consuming part of our daily routine that it is now, but even fairly early on it was already encompassing the same breadth of human awfulness and inanity that we see today.

Here are 10 pioneering websites which we all visited at least once.
ERIC CONVEYS AN EMOTION
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Emotion Eric invited his website visitors to suggest an emotion, which he would then convey in a picture. Eric published his emotions on a Tuesday, because on Mondays he was preoccupied with the regular Strong Bad Email newsletter from the Homestarrunner website; another late-90s/early-2000s online phenomenon.

​Eric conveyed emotions from 1998 to 2004, and his website is still online. However, despite making the occasional promise over the years, Eric has yet to convey another emotion. Perhaps the most ironic thing that could ever happen is if Eric were to have a stroke, paralysing his facial muscles, thus making him unable to convey any emotion ever again.

Let's hope that doesn't happen.
BERT IS EVIL
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Winning a Webby Award in 1998 for weirdest website, Bert is Evil featured Photoshopped images of the monobrowed, bed-sharing, Sesame Street character in various dubious scenarios.

​A precursor to the meme-saturated culture of today, Bert is Evil was finally stopped in its tracks by 9/11. An image showing Bert with supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was the result of legal threats by Sesame Street owners Sesame Workshop, leading to the removal of the site.

In a telling reflection of that time, Sesame Workshop had never seemed to mind when Bert was pictured with Adolf Hitler or the Klu Klux Klan.
FRIENDS REUNITED
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We all did it didn't we? And by did it I mean "Signed up for a Friends Reunited account so that we could show off about how amaaaaaaazing our life was now to all those people we hated in school".

Of course, Friends Reunited is best known these days as one of the greatest examples of missing an open goal; from a seemingly unassailable position, FR gradually lost ground to more aggressive social media platforms.

​Bought inexplicably by ITV for £120 million at the point where the site seemed to be in an unstoppable decline, ITV sold it four years later to the owners of the Beano for £25 million. A year later, its worth was said to be a mere £5.2 million.

After a failed attempt to refocus on nostalgia, the site eventually closed in 2016, by which time everyone was on Facebook, show off about how amaaaaaaazing our life was to all those people we hated in school.

​I don't care how old your child is!!!!!
DANCING BABY
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One of the first ever viral videos - though these days it's hard to understand why - the Dancing Baby, or Baby Cha-Cha, was so ubiquitous that it even became a regular fixture of the TV show Ally McBeal.

Back in the 90s there was literally nothing funnier than sending a link to the dancing baby to your friends and family, with a typical subject line reading "This is sooooo funny", even though it obviously wasn't. It was just a CGI dancing baby.

Life was so much simpler back then...
SORRY EVERYBODY
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There was a time when George W. Bush was the epitome of Bad Presidents, to the point where Americans created a website following his 2004 election, holding up signs apologising to the world.

​Of course, in the wake of Trump, Bush has undergone something of a reappraisal, and is now seen as a sort of harmless, kindly uncle, who does bad paintings, rather than the clueless, out-of-his-depth, buffoon who helped destabilise the world with his murderous foreign policy.

​Still better than Trump though.
JENNICAM
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Jennifer Ringley was the first person ever to document her life through daily videos, thus making her the precursor to Zoella, Fun For Louis, and the rest of that godawful, narcissistic, YouTube clique.  

Her always-on webcam ensured that no part of her life was off-limits - even the less flattering aspects - in stark contrast to the more carefully curated vlogger branding more common today. However, after seven years, Ringley stopped broadcasting - citing a change in PayPal's policy, banning services which might feature nudity - and disappeared almost completely from the Internet. 

Most visitors to Jennicam were treated to a low-resolution image of her empty bedroom, and swiftly decided that they couldn't understand what the fuss was all about.
HAMPSTER DANCE
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At its height, this page featuring some cartoon hamsters dancing in an endless loop to the same few sped-up seconds of the song Whistlestop - written for Disney's animated Robin Hood movie - was getting 15,000 views a day.

​It became such a phenomenon that the "Hampsters" even released a single that got to number 1 in Canada, eh.
THE MILLION DOLLAR HOME PAGE
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The Million Dollar Homepage sported a million pixels that were sold for $1 a pop to pay for the university education of Wiltshire student Alex Tew. He offered the pixels in dollars rather than pounds, as he correctly surmised that the dollar was the closest thing the world had to a universal currency.

The page took just five months to fill up completely. Perhaps tellingly, Tew dropped out of his university course after a year, and attempted to recreate the success of his homepage with One Million People - in which visitors could pay to have their photograph, rather than an ad, placed on the page.

It wasn't the success Tew wanted, and he now lives in San Francisco, working as an "entrepreneur", and selling guided meditations through his app Calm. 
OGRISH
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A collection of the most disturbing images anybody might want to see (or not see), Ogrish was - for all but the most wrong-headed and un-empathic - a website the majority of people definitely visited only once.

Featuring real pictures and videos of accidents, atrocities and executions, on my one and only visit the first thing I saw was somebody who had been decapitated by the blades of a helicopter rotor. It still bothers me to this day.
COFFEE POT CAM
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A webcam was aimed at a coffee pot in a computer laboratory in the University of Cambridge. Originally, it was set up with a practical purpose; so that those on the office network could see if the coffee pot was empty or not, thus saving them a wasted trip.

When it was connected to the Internet a few years later, the pot became a bona-fide online phenomenon, as millions around the world switched on to see the current coffee level. 

The camera was switched off in 2001 after 10 years, and the pot was auctioned off, being bought by German news website Spiegel Online for some reason - for £3,350. 
41 Comments
Da5e
25/10/2017 10:20:59 am

Was the helicopter decapitation the one on the deck of an aircraft carrier, where there was an image of just how far bits of brain-meat had been scattered hither and yon by the impact of the rotor blades? Because I've never been able to get that out of my head. It's been near enough twenty years since I was it.

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Mr Biffo
25/10/2017 10:24:20 am

Yep.

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Nicholas Taylor
27/10/2017 11:59:51 pm

It sounds like a scene from the movie Broken Arrow. I saw that instead.

Terence link
10/12/2019 07:29:46 am

Fuck you so hard

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Ally
12/12/2021 02:48:20 pm

No thanks

Alastair
25/10/2017 10:36:32 am

It feels like I've been on none of those but exact clones of then all.

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Dr Budd Buttocks, MD
25/10/2017 10:40:25 am

This made me a little dewy eyed and wistful for the dialup days. Do you remember do you remember do you remember that?

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Amnesiac
25/10/2017 04:10:06 pm

No.

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treacle
25/10/2017 11:04:50 am

That dacing baby nonsense was the first time I rememer the internets near deification of the truly witless. Sadly it appears that Timecube is no longer online, a real visit once gem of incomprehensible pseudo science.

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wut link
30/7/2020 09:45:18 pm

its back https://timecube.2enp.com/

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dracu link
20/12/2021 01:04:28 pm

hai in iad cu mine

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alb
25/10/2017 11:14:48 am

Never heard of Ogrish, but our go to horror site at work (!) was rotten.com which had similar parameters. The one that's stuck in my mind was a picture of an Asian kid who'd been decapitated by a train; the head had come to rest perfectly (or had been posed) upright.

Looks like rotten.com has disappeared as well.

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RG
25/10/2017 11:37:31 am

I remember being shown rotten.com and seeing something horrible - I think it was a motorcycle accident. I have seem to have thankfully managed to erase this from my brain at last.

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Paul Milne
25/10/2017 01:00:04 pm

yeah, similarly I've never heard of Ogrish, but all the coolsters/dickheads were into Rotten My one visit, I think I got off lightly by 'only' seeing some decaying corpse, not a gory splatter scene. I don't want to see horrible stuff like that! Boo hoo.

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n317
28/10/2017 11:14:08 pm

I seem to recall the teenagers that I taught (managed) at the time went to steakandcheese.com for such gore

n317
28/10/2017 11:15:38 pm

And having now checked that site out, it's a much healthier site, being as it is full of pr0n.

Heeden
1/11/2017 10:34:35 pm

Rotten.com was my go-to site for hideousities, along with steakandcheese.

Also there was Ebaum's world, can't remember exactly what was on it but I think it's where I first heard the Lion-O/Snarf Thundercat outtakes.

On a more innocent note, weebl's stuff was another old-school favourited before popping over to some geocity sites to download a few midi files.

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Chris
25/10/2017 11:35:27 am

I was expecting to see goatse on here.
And possibly amihotornot.

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Guru Larry link
25/10/2017 11:49:14 am

I joined Friends Reunited in its early days, It was terrible, people thought it would be funny to report they had been killed in a car crash Etc >.>

But if you wanted to talk to any friends there to actually "reunite" that was £5 a month, so when Facebook offered it for free, it was the nail in the coffin for them.

I remember Ogrish, their sister site Rotten.com still exists. though it's not been updated in years.

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Nick
25/10/2017 11:49:28 am

Did we all visit the Teletubbies Execution Chamber? Alas, only a couple of the gifs are preserved in this archive.org backup:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010802182824/http://tinpan.fortunecity.com:80/baccarach/148/exec/tubbyindex.html

Also: Maddox's The Best Page In The Universe.

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RichardM
25/10/2017 01:40:22 pm

Wow... Maddox is still - loosely - going. He and Seanbaby occupy a similar place in my head: I see the latter now writes clickbait lists for a living.

Funny Biffo should mention Homestarrunner, I was looking at some of their stuff the other day. They are to blame for me liking They Might Be Giants, which has in turn led to me being liked by nobody.

“Make a little birdhouse in your soul...”

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Col. Asdasd
25/10/2017 12:46:58 pm

I'M RICH, YOUR NOT

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Nick
25/10/2017 12:54:21 pm

Good day to you Colonel Richard Asdasd.

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Omniro
25/10/2017 01:52:44 pm

The coffe pot cam didn't just display a coffee pot, they actually INVENTED the webcam for it!

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Chris
25/10/2017 01:56:03 pm

Although, in reality, it did just show a coffee pot.

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Justin
25/10/2017 01:57:03 pm

I dont recall rotten.com or the other one. There was a site called nothing yoxic.com thatncontained some nasties but even that turned commercial and did away with the nastier aspects. The only other sickening site i remember was thats phucked.com im not sure if thats still around but its one of the few web adresses i know of that facebook has a ban on

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Wicked Eric
25/10/2017 02:45:44 pm

Slap a Spice Girl

Probably couldn't get away with that these days.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
25/10/2017 02:56:04 pm

I remember finding a site that had the “best” of Jennicam... her in the shower, her in bed with some dude... and a few pictures (naked of course) taken with actual cameras.

I can’t imagine paying actual money for this, even at the time.

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Greg'DICE'Kibworth
25/10/2017 04:00:31 pm

I can't believe you failed to mention the Wayne Gretzky site, the one which featured him staring out of various windows, may personal fav was him looking mournfully out of a windswept cafe/diner, it would update roughly every 3 weeks, all my peers would try and guess where he'd be next, I'm sure it hits a nerve with my fellow digi fans.

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Dr Alex P. Gaywood
25/10/2017 04:50:22 pm

www.ratemypoo.com

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Biscuits
25/10/2017 06:12:43 pm

This came to mind but yesterday, after I managed a particularly spectacular amount of porcelain coverage. I took the pic and everything, but was disappointed to discover the site went the way of its contents. Note to self: delete that picture

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John
25/10/2017 05:14:16 pm

I rather enjoyed CatScan - images of peoples cats captured by flatbed scanners.

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Chris
25/10/2017 05:26:02 pm

There's a similar Tumblr still going! (well, was back in April) http://thecatscan.tumblr.com

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Biscuits
25/10/2017 07:03:51 pm

Good article, if others like it exist I haven't seen them.

My dial up days were spent on the Foo Fighters chat room and the incredibly sophomoric monkeysrobots.com, which featured some early Flash cartoons, that probably took 20 minutes to download each time, and are, in retrospect*, crap. But this was pre-nerd culture days, when simply the IDEA of Skeletor having a job in a frozen yoghurt place was funny, let alone that he yells his trademark 'HEEEE MAAAAAN' at the end. I was an idiot, see.

I also used to love Snopes when it was snopes2.com. The urban legends were about The Chinese name for Coke ('bite the wax tadpole') and furtive wangs lurking in the backgrounds of Disney movies; not interminable political hearsay.

*They recently resurfaced on Youtube after a decade and a half's searching

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Spiney O’Sullivan
25/10/2017 09:48:12 pm

I have fond memories of watching dumb/surreal animated things on AlbinoBlackSheep before YouTube was a thing.

This also reminds me that I haven’t looked at b3ta in a looooooong time. I remember it being very funny.

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Chris Dyson
25/10/2017 09:20:04 pm

I never did find out why everyone in the friends reunited banner wore sunglasses. They were so cool.

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Starbuck
25/10/2017 10:01:33 pm

I used to like dogsincars.com, back before dogging was even invented!

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James Walker link
25/10/2017 11:44:32 pm

Fat chicks in party hats & Real Ultimate power ninja homepage ruled.

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PS1Snake
26/10/2017 09:33:32 pm

I've never visited any of these websites...

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Vaishnavi Alva link
9/5/2020 08:37:31 am

Hey I also have black background website like yours. If you have a minute then please do visit my website. www.spacegodx.com .Its still under process. Would appreciate any feedback of yours

Reply
Micah link
23/11/2020 02:02:44 pm

DO THESE EVEN HAVE A USE?

Reply



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