wayback.exe

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://fedi.directory/wayback-exe/

i love that bruce damer has kept his homepage for the Avatars! virtual worlds book online for 30 uninterrupted years.

https://damer.com/avatars/index.html

#vrml #webHistory #webPreservation #worldWideWeb

Metaplace Postmortem (2008): "Snow Crash is a Lie"

jussst after i wished there had been some kind of postmortem done on raph koster's Metaplace, i found out that he himself presented one at GDC 2008!

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/34/Metaplace-Postmortem-Reinventing

if you're not familiar with Metaplace, I don't blame you. It was an attempt at making a web-based graphical MUD/MUSH/MOO/MMO virtual world development system that could be played online in any browser. it disappeared almost as quickly as it was developed.

what i find most fascinating about it was that it had a Lua-based scripting system called Metascript. it featured some really hot runtime behaviours like being able to load/unload scripts on any object. (which means you never needed to recompile to test your world)

#mud #moo #worldWideweb #lua #gdc #mmo

so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.

back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.

snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home

Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.

both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.

we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.

what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?

#moo #mud #smallWeb #indieWeb #worldWideWeb #furcadia

am overcome with gratitude. after hours of searching usenet, ftp indexers, ftp sites, archive.org, discmaster and every archival tool i know of and coming up with zilch, i jusssst found the MacMOOSE software buried in a professor's apache open dir! he worked in the same research group as MacMOOSE (Epistemology & Learning Group @ MIT) and had the foresight to make a tarball of the lab's FTP server before it died years ago

this is the kind of archival once in a million thing - that someone self-archived an incredibly important and obscure piece of software by accident, and left a copy on the web. thank you prof fred g. martin 🙏

this archive of the MIT ELG ftp server is going straight to archive.org.

update: WinMOOSE has also been found thanks to https://mas.to/@justinto/115990209538195283

#archival #digiPres #worldWideWeb

just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.

MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996

"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.

Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."

(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)

while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.

i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity

this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/

Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/

#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres

Day 3 in #mastodon No pervs, no homophobes, no #incels no mysoginity, no adverts. Lots of different languages, intersting stuff from #worldwideweb Welcome to me. I must improve my english.

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor #TimBernersLee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the #internet
Founder of #worldwideweb says commercialisation means net is ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail
It wasn't until polarization of 2016 election that he had enough with Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges #socialmedia does not represent entire web, but is "optimized for nastiness"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web

Ein sehr interessanter Vortrag zur Geschichte des frühen Webs, den die Kolleg*innen vom @ZZF gehalten haben. Unbedingt einmal reinschauen! #DigitalHistoryOFK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNv8YPO0T4

#WebHistory #DigitalHumanities #WorldWideWeb

bleem!.com in october 2000 😎

for anyone who doesn't remember bleem: it was a very early PSX emulator that would let you play certain playstation games on your DreamCast or in Windows.

it got sued out of existence by sony a year later.

#digiPres #webHistory #worldWideWeb

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web
#TimBernersLee #BernersLee #WWW #WorldWideWeb #news #opinion

schönes Lesestück: 1993, das WWW, Mosaic für X-Windows, MTV.com und Adam Curry "setting up a WWW server that will blow the socks off your Mosaic viewer" ...
😁

#history #vintagecomputing #www #worldwideweb #timbernerslee #mosaic #marcandreessen #mtvdotcom #adamcurry #InT8vint4ysK

https://cybercultural.com/p/1993-mtv-internet/

If not stopped #AI could kill the entire #Internet in the next 3 years, more than half of the #WorldWideWeb ( #WWW ) is already #bot #slop, & give itself permanent crippling brain rot in the process. Way to screw up a good thing rich Techbros 🖕🏾

"Dead Internet Is Now: Increasingly Dysfunctional AI Now Outpaces Humans ..."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=75anUru4tCM&si=tf3tlXdqzug_QBwb

A Website Served From a Floppy Disk
We appreciate all kinds of electronic entertainment here at Set Side B, and fun and interesting websites definitely fits that idiosyncratic bill. It's a simple guestbook-style application. The whole site, including the OS, is served from a single 3½-inch floppy disk.

The idea is, people can go there and enter a message for posterity,
https://setsideb.com/a-website-served-from-a-floppy-disk/
#niche #floppy #guestbook #niche #website #worldwideweb

The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting – HackerNoon

New Story, 1,290 reads

The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting

by Bruce Li, January 12th, 2026

A Comprehensive Engineering and Operational Analysis of the Internet Archive

Introduction: The Hum of History in the Fog

If you stand quietly in the nave of the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, you can hear the sound of the internet breathing. It is not the chaotic screech of a dial-up modem or the ping of a notification, but a steady, industrial hum—a low-frequency thrum generated by hundreds of spinning hard drives and the high-velocity fans that cool them. This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that has taken on the Sisyphean task of recording the entire digital history of human civilization.

Internet Archive’s office in San Francisco

Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the “virtual” world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3

The scale of the operation is staggering, but the engineering challenge is even deeper. How do you build a machine that can ingest the sprawling, dynamic, and ever-changing World Wide Web in real-time? How do you store that data for centuries when the average hard drive lasts only a few years? And perhaps most critically, how do you pay for the electricity, the bandwidth, and the legal defense funds required to keep the lights on in an era where copyright law and digital preservation are locked in a high-stakes collision?

This report delves into the mechanics of the Internet Archive with the precision of a teardown. We will strip back the chassis to examine the custom-built PetaBox servers that heat the building without air conditioning. We will trace the evolution of the web crawlers—from the early tape-based dumps of Alexa Internet to the sophisticated browser-based bots of 2025. We will analyze the financial ledger of this non-profit giant, exploring how it survives on a budget that is a rounding error for its Silicon Valley neighbors. And finally, we will look to the future, where the “Decentralized Web” (DWeb) promises to fragment the Archive into a million pieces to ensure it can never be destroyed.5

To understand the Archive is to understand the physical reality of digital memory. It is a story of 20,000 hard drives, 45 miles of cabling, and a vision that began in 1996 with a simple, audacious goal: “Universal Access to All Knowledge”.7

Part I: The Thermodynamics of Memory

The PetaBox Architecture: Engineering for Density and Heat

The heart of the Internet Archive is the PetaBox, a storage server custom-designed by the Archive’s staff to solve a specific problem: storing massive amounts of data with minimal power consumption and heat generation. In the early 2000s, off-the-shelf enterprise storage solutions from giants like EMC or NetApp were prohibitively expensive and power-hungry. They were designed for high-speed transactional data—like banking systems or stock exchanges—where milliseconds of latency matter. Archival storage, however, has different requirements. It needs to be dense, cheap, and low-power.

Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive (with the PetaBox behind him)

Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder and a computer engineer who had previously founded the supercomputer company Thinking Machines, approached the problem with a different philosophy. Instead of high-performance RAID arrays, the Archive built the PetaBox using consumer-grade parts. The design philosophy was radical for its time: use “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD) rather than expensive RAID controllers, and handle data redundancy via software rather than hardware.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting | HackerNoon

This is the Web of the 1990s and, to some degree, the early 2000s — that some of us experienced and remember.

The Web that some of us want to make a come back.

#WorldWideWeb

You can finally chat with Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa+ on the web – PCWorld

1. Home
2. News
3. Streaming News

News

You can finally chat with Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa+ on the web

The just-launched website lets you share files with Alexa+, manage shopping lists and to-do items, control smart home devices, and more.

By Ben Patterson, Senior Writer, TechHive, Dec 17, 2025 7:57 am PST

Summary created by Smart Answers AI

In summary:

• Amazon has launched a web portal for Alexa+ at Alexa.com, providing early access users with a ChatGPT-like interface featuring suggested prompts and easy text copying capabilities.
• PCWorld reports the portal allows file uploads for document analysis and offers improved usability compared to previous voice-only interactions with Amazon’s AI assistant.
• Alexa+ remains free during early access, with future plans to offer it free to Prime members while charging non-Prime users a monthly fee.

It’s been nearly a year since Amazon first launched the new, AI-enhanced Alexa+, but until now, a key feature has been missing: the ability to access and chat with Alexa+ on the web. 

Now it appears Amazon has fulfilled that promise, with an Alexa+ web portal finally going live—for at least some Alexa+ early access users, anyway—at Alexa.com. 

The new Alexa+ web portal will look familiar to anyone who’s accessed ChatGPT or Google Gemini on the web. A big chatbox sits front and center, with a friendly “Hello Ben, how can I help?” heading, along with buttons that reveal suggested prompts (“Create a plan for my next getaway,” “Teach me a surprising fun fact,” “Add an event to my calendar,” “Create an image of a dinosaur,” “Book a table at a nearby restaurant”) on mouse rollover. 

On the left side of the screen are shortcuts to your Alexa+ chat history (good for revisiting Alexa+ discussions you’ve had on an Echo speaker), smart home controls (just basic ones, mind you), your calendar, lists, reminders, and uploaded files. 

That last feature—the ability to upload files to Alexa+—is a big one, as it allows you to do things like upload resumes for Alexa to tinker with, or any other documents you’d like Alexa to analyze.  

Just for fun, I uploaded a configuration file for the Jellyfin media player installation on my Raspberry Pi, and Alexa+ did a reasonably good job of sifting through the code and offering optimization suggestions. (Alexa+ gets a decent chunk of its AI smarts courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude.) I then picked up the conversation on an Echo speaker, allowing Alexa and me to continue batting around Jellyfin ideas. 

Another nifty thing about the new Alexa+ web portal is that it makes Alexa+’s ability to compose letters and other documents a lot more useful. Before, if you asked Alexa+ to write (for example) a thank-you letter to a friend, there was no easy way to grab the text and put it into a text editor for fine-tuning. (It’s possible to access Alexa+ chats in the Alexa app, but it’s a tedious process.) With the web portal, you can just click the Copy button beneath any Alexa+ response, just as you can with ChatGPT or Gemini. 

Continue/Read Original Article Here: You can finally chat with Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa+ on the web | PCWorld

That was a a fun and great book club by the @ACM about the book, "This Is For Everyone" by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, @timbl

I'm looking forward to the next one 🙂

https://www.acm.org/education/acm-book-club

#ACMBookClub #BookClub #ACM #WWW #WorldWideWeb #book #books #ACMBookClub2025

Is the Dictionary Done For? – The New Yorker

A Critic at Large

Is the Dictionary Done For?

The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution.

By Louis Menand, December 22, 2025

Wars over words are inevitably culture wars, and debates over the dictionary have raged for as long as it has existed. Photo illustration by Stephen Doyle

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture young persons by insisting that they learn to do something few people do well. The purpose of the dictionary was to settle intra-family disputes over the spelling of words like “camaraderie” and “sesquipedalian,” or over the correct pronunciation of “puttee.” (Dad wasn’t always right!) Also, it was sometimes useful for doing homework or playing Scrabble.

This was the state of the world not that long ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary was on the Times best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-five consecutive weeks. Fifty-seven million copies were sold, a number believed to be second only, in this country, to sales of the Bible. (The No. 1 print dictionary in the world is the Chinese-language Xinhua Dictionary; more than five hundred million copies have sold since it was introduced, in 1953.)

There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it. And, if you run across an unfamiliar word, you can type it into your browser and get a list of websites with information about it, often way more than you want or need. Like the rest of the analog world, legacy dictionaries have had to adapt or perish. Stefan Fatsis’s “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” (Atlantic Monthly Press) is a good-natured and sympathetic account of what seems to be a losing struggle.

The Best Books of 2025, Discover the year’s essential reads in fiction and nonfiction.

Fatsis is a reporter whose work has appeared in a number of venues, including Slate and NPR, and who has mainly covered sports. For one of his books, he embedded with professional football teams—“participatory journalism,” a reportorial genre made popular by George Plimpton. For “Unabridged,” Fatsis embedded in the offices of Merriam-Webster, which are in Springfield, Massachusetts (home to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, which I’ll bet he visited). There, he played amateur lexicographer, digging up new candidates for inclusion and trying his hand at definitions, which, as he demonstrates, is more challenging than it looks. (He found that asking ChatGPT to do it had poor results.)

As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.

He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no word describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Is the Dictionary Done For? | The New Yorker

On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, laying the groundwork for the modern internet! 🚀 This innovation transformed how we access information and connect with one another. #WebHistory #Innovation #WorldWideWeb