Holy crap, it’s been fourteen years since Mirsky’s Worst of the Web stopped doing their shtick. That’s depressing.
IMHO, I think we’re really at Web 5.0 now, with some overlap between the various epochs.
Web 1.0 (1990-1994): Obscurity. Gopher was still larger than the Web at this point. Almost all Web sites are academic and research-oriented. WorldWideWeb.app, Lynx and other text-oriented browsers.
Web 2.0 (1993-1996): Pre-commercial Web. Gopher declines. Majority of sites are at places of higher education and research institutions, with some basic sites at large corporations, non-profit groups and government agencies. Student-created home pages. Dominant browser is NCSA Mosaic.
Web 3.0 (1995-2001): Early commercialization. Dot-com boom. Gopher abandoned. Rise of retail and multimedia sites. Primitive search “spiders” and human-edited Web directories. User-created home pages and static content on local dial-up ISP accounts and free services like Geocities. Earliest memes that jump from the Web into mainstream culture; Mahir Cagr, dancing baby. Primitive porn and camwhore sites. Early webmail services. Dominant browser is Netscape; “Browser Wars” era.
Web 4.0 (2000-2006): Post-boom. The real boom, IMHO. The Web is mainstream. Local governments, small businesses and organizations, elementary and high schools, and other groups all have Web sites. User-created dynamic content. Rise of blogs and message boards. Widespread news sites. Reliable search engines. Rise of CSS and stylesheets. Content management systems with PHP/MySQL back ends replace manually coded static pages. Dominant browser is Internet Explorer.
Web 5.0 (2005-present): Web 2.0. Widespread use of social and business networking sites (LiveJournal, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare). Ajax; instantly updated sites and Web apps. The Web is an integral part of real life culture; in developed nations, only most Luddite-oriented elderly and very poor aren’t online. No dominant browser.
I really, really miss Dr. Fun.
Cartoonists who are funny and just quit need to be punished. They should be forced to read “Cathy” strips over and over. Except Gary Larsen. He gets “Family Circle”.
Do you mean the Family Circus?
Whatever happened to the Acrophobia game?
Dang, some of these are really triggering memories!
And now I need to find…remember, rather, THEN find…my favorite comic while I was doing HP Tech support. It was an office of tech support guys, and my favorite was always the slightly older, pony-tailed hippie who never really got upset about anything because his expectations of people were so low to begin with. It was much much better than Dilbert, that’s all I’m saying. Oh and one of the tech guys was Russian, and the boss was the original pointy-haired boss, haha.
Anyone know what I’m talking about? I’d love for it to be around still.
FOUND IT!
User Friendly. I am a very happy camper; thank you for starting this thread. <3
By Illiad! I always wondered at the hubris of a person that decided to call himself something from Homer.
…and apparently still at it: http://www.userfriendly.org/
Oh, who could forget it? BOFH was my hero.
Wow. The Find the Spam game is still online.
Second suck.com, and throw in Usenet.
Usenet used to be cool before it became completely dominated by spammers.
Adequacy.org was literally the greatest trolling site in the history of the web. The site is still up, and you can still read the comments on the articles of people who didn’t realise they were being wound up.
Adequacy.org was the site that published the “The Bombings Prove That I Am Right About Everything” essay, right? That one was brilliant.
Yeah. Everything about that site was a troll. Even the icons they used for the different article categories (a scorpion for feminists, the challenger disaster for NASA, etc.)
Disclaimer: I have had this link in my bookmarks for ages, but haven’t checked it out, because I spent far too much of my time in the old game when my youngest was a baby keeping me up all night… Dang if I can even remember the name of my team, now, though. I do remember that we surrounded our names with >(name))> to look like fish, though.
Those were the days…