Re: The History of Vimm's Lair (circa 2002)
Posted by thewhat on .
Had fun reading this and recalling the days of 14.4 connections, Netscape and early 90s ISPs. I used Earthlink at one point--I think my dad and I bounced between a half-dozen different providers over the years, even besides countless free "trials" of AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. The latter was also my first web host, and I fondly remember the days of building a Mortal Kombat 3 site in their rudimentary HTML editor. Later went on to do a Killer Instinct 2 site hosted by Dragonfire, which I'm sure very few people remember. They hosted a range of nerdy stuff including a fair amount of RPG-related sites if memory serves.
Makes me wonder how much of the regular user base here is old enough to remember much of that time. The old guy in me laughs when younger folks complain about spending hours downloading multi-gigabyte games today when it used to take me hours to download a couple of 128kbit MP3s, back when regular everyday web sites were offering Aerosmith, Offspring, Wu Tang tracks, years before Napster, RIAA takedowns, etc. I remember how exciting it was when 28.8 modems became the norm. Later 56k made me feel like a rich kid.
Thanks for the memory jog, and for spending a few decades building this invaluable little archive into what it is now. Here's hoping it is and remains a fulfilling project for you as long as you're at the helm.
Makes me wonder how much of the regular user base here is old enough to remember much of that time. The old guy in me laughs when younger folks complain about spending hours downloading multi-gigabyte games today when it used to take me hours to download a couple of 128kbit MP3s, back when regular everyday web sites were offering Aerosmith, Offspring, Wu Tang tracks, years before Napster, RIAA takedowns, etc. I remember how exciting it was when 28.8 modems became the norm. Later 56k made me feel like a rich kid.
Thanks for the memory jog, and for spending a few decades building this invaluable little archive into what it is now. Here's hoping it is and remains a fulfilling project for you as long as you're at the helm.
I was cleaning out some old files and found an unpublished article I wrote about the founding of Vimm's Lair. It looks to have been written in 2002 when the dot-com crash was still fresh. There's details I've long forgotten and it really struck me just how different the internet was then. It's an unedited draft, but I thought it'd be fun to share.
https://vimm.net/history
https://vimm.net/history