How is it possible to play Minefield, where is the compute happening? Is the browser acting as a thin client? What's the most demanding program that could be run.. Microsoft Word 95? Perhaps this whole experience can be modernized? If memory is in short-supply, why not make the most of what's around and never let good memory rest?
This is very similar to a project I'm working on called Sim95 [1]. It has an entire networking stack and visual basic style language. You can host your own websites, chat servers, anything you want, and everything runs over a virtual network (websocket that passes through a relay).
It has all the warts of the early internet era: you can program a virus, get people to download it, delete their documents, etc., but it also has a lot of the charm, build a website, chat with strangers, enjoy the lack of facebook (for now until someone builds it).
A BIND/DNS service built in so we can point multiple hosts to a single machine (the 5 tabs are burning my browser).
The ability to modify the core OS a bit. Would be fun to work on skins, change default behavior, or add capabilities into the Spark language itself. would love to add screenshot capabilities for screenshare service.
A domain registrar was my next one, but trying to find a good way to "balance" that so that one person doesn't just register everything. I was contemplating adding in-game money, and a banking system, and expose an API for e-payments, then the registrar could charge for domains. Then that just pushes the buck down the road to how do you get money? So opening a bank account gets you a toaster and $200 or something, but then whats stopping you from opening 10 accounts... so THEN I invented government and a national ID... anyway, all that seemed hard and I got distracted by "easier" ideas.
I hadn't even planned on releasing this yet, it's been a weekend project for the last few months, that I try to add one thing each time. Lately I've been working on software for it, I was going to create a better IDE. A mix of VB6 and FrontPage, but I keep getting distracted by other weekend projects.
Keeping aggressive expiration could help "cleanup". Make it always required to point to an active and online machine for some duration.
You could just become ICANN and allow anyone to host any TLD they want and keep certain TLDs reserved for yourself/own vetted projects.
I feel like "in-game currency" changes the goal of the system a bit. Though I have considered building PaySimPal service. So maybe not?
I think right now, what resonates with me in this project is just how open and buildable everything is. No forcing function to do things a certain way. Like I was about to go build a basic BIND service to serve DNS traffic over and let my Internet Explorer browser use it for host name resolution. Just, that means only people on IE would be able to view my beautiful works of art.
> Like I was about to go build a basic BIND service to serve DNS traffic over and let my Internet Explorer browser use it for host name resolution.
Do it, and I can back port that to the voyager, but the biggest thing this needs is the ability to run a server "headless" so people can start building infrastructure and leaving it running without the browser tab being open. But I love the idea that their tab closing actually turns off their server resulting in an outage.
I added a Show HN[1] if you want to discuss on their, I highlighted some of your sites, but I guess they've moved, now.
I've been having a little too much fun with it honestly. I've tinkered with so far:
Simbook, ColdMail (email server, website for mail), Frostbird (a spark program for checking emails), AskSim (an ask jeeves search engine that actually crawls all of the machines in the network), Simxplorer (An IE browser with a javascript engine built into it), ELIZA (the preLLM chatbot with silly responses), Vapor (a Steam like program downloader that also has Doom and Snake). I'm toying around with a Clippy idea but haven't landed on if I like it or not.
I was a high schooler working at CompUSA when 56K modems were first available and it was a sensation. They were flying off the shelves. I still had a 28.8 modem at home at the time.
Getting a job in a mom-and-pop ISP back in 1999. Our uplinks were so constrained that with 40 dial-in lines, we needed to run our own bandwidth-throttled NNTP cache to prevent one or two customers relentlessly trawling Usenet making life horrible for the others. Fun times.
I was so excited to get road runner, which was an isp from I think time warner, rolling out cable modem service in the early 2000s. I ended up taking a day of vacation just to ensure I was going to be home for the installation window.
I don’t remember if my computer at the time had built-in Ethernet or if I had to buy a card.
I have been always-online ever since. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
I had the first iPhone and distinctly remember telling people "I have the entire internet in my pocket at all times" and people finding it strange. I said "I never really have to log off Facebook or Digg" and my friends didn't understand what I meant.
For me it was ‘02 when I moved to college and got that sweet dorm room internet. Some of my friends had aim via text messaging.
2012 is a good date for roaming internet, although for the plans and places I’ve been it’s only been the last 3 or so years that roaming internet has been mostly reliable.
I want to say I was online by default earlier, just because I preferred that life to my offline one, but online clearly hadn't become 'real life' yet. Sure, your online life could affect your offline life if you really wanted to make it happen or were just really dumb, but whatever did happen online, it could be brushed off and you could Just™ wash your hands of whatever happened and go and do something else, be that play a different game, browse a different forum, or just log off.
Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.
> Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.
I mean, you can still have this: by 1. Not being Chronically Online and 2. Not worrying so much or watching what is going on online.
I’ve managed to keep the separation between “online” and “the real world.” Mostly by just not participating or caring about social media. Online only invades Real Life to the extent that you allow it to.
There might be someone over on Instagram “canceling” me right now! I have no idea because I don’t even have an account there.
> I mean, you can still have this: by 1. Not being Chronically Online and 2. Not worrying so much or watching what is going on online.
It's hard to not attribute the current political climate and all its downwind effects to the online world affecting the real world, and that political climate is affecting me and most people I know, whether I like it or not.
There's 'offline by default at home' and 'offline by default overall'. And it can blur.
At least as far as 'offline by default at home'
After (1) my dad retired and bought a brand new fancy PC with some of his unused leave time [0] we wound up getting a dial-up account [1] but sometime around 1998/1999 [2] we wound up just getting a secondary phone line; somehow the 'internet' was so magical to all of us kids or young adults, that it was better for our parent's budget to just pay for the extra phone line.
Still, it wasn't even 56K. Phone lines in my area of Detroit were garbage, if it did connect at 56K it was unstable as hell, 28.8 was the 'reliable' connection rate, to the point you prayed that was what it connected at.
For 'offline overall' the change can be more blurry, at least in my head. I blame work phones, my PSP's WiFi capabilities, and the HTC Dream (released 2008) as the slow shift for me.
FWIW, I did enjoy my time on WinPho, where the siloing of the OS and lack of apps, led to a quieter time where my phone was a 'phone' (and honestly, still a better one at calls, SMS, or driving navigation than than my current one) rather than be tempted by anything online.
It's weird to think about. Before I went to college, Online (thanks to that dial-up) was an escape from the prison of my home and where I lived. But now Online feels more like a tug away from enjoying life.
[0] - P2 266 MHZ 32MB Ram, 2(? might have been 4) GB HDD...
[1] - Thanks Diablo for the WorldNet trial and thanks WorldNet for having the practically unlimited usage thing [4]
[2] - My oldest Sister was Driving home from College and the engine on the car blew up while I was online. She couldn't call for help. [3]
[3] - How's that for a technology shift though, as far as taking things for granted (i.e. call waiting being seamless and not costing extra per month.)
[4] - Except for the bit where when AT&T somehow figured out we were using a 'Share-dial-up-over-LAN' a few years later, had to switch to Mindspring after dad had me do the research.
56k dial-up was a special upgrade from US Robotics and only some providers/numbers would have that speed. Yeah, as you said, more likely you will end up with 28.8 (based on the live negotiation during the connection setup I think)
Lovely. 16MB of RAM in the 90s? That's luxury.
And that dial-up sound always takes me back to happier times. Not unlike normal people's childhood songs.
Love the detail of getting kicked off the internet because someone picked up the phone.
Back when I was 12, I installed linux on an old 386 to set up a little server. I remember writing the connection script to get on the internet. I still wonder how I learned to do that. Still a mystery! But those were the days when you just figured things out.
This is great! I especially enjoyed the live chat feature, that was surprising. Should definitely allow HN to go through on the browser, though, that would be awesome. It would only take... ~90 seconds to load. Damn, it's heavier than I thought.
Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.
And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.
This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.
56k modems didn’t always negotiate to the full 56k. The handshaking allowed connections at much slower speeds. It depended on the quality of the line. This is the US - we didn’t have ISDN, at least no one I knew had it in 1996.
ISDN was available near me in 1996 (Southern California, Pacific Bell) ... but nobody I knew had it. It cost a lot for the install and monthly, and there was no unlimited local calls tariff like there was for a regular "analog" lane. You'd have to be pretty serious to want that.
In order to get 56k, you needed to be on a reasonable quality line, and there needed to be an all digital (PRI) connection between the Telco end of your phone line and your ISP.
If your line was noisy good luck. If your line had loading coils in the path between the CO and you, that would help your voice calls but make 56k harder to achieve (and was definitely problematic for DSL). Most telephone lines had loading coils every wire mile between the CO and the customer. If you had any of the older wonky stuff telcos used to magic more pairs for customers out of thin air, chances are they wouldn't work at 56k.
I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".
FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.
Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...
Who is upvoting this AI-generated nonsense? This is embarrassingly badly made. We have a solitaire game where you cannot drag the cards (and HTML elements move around every time you click), a pinball game with no gap between the flippers, etc etc etc... Nothing about this suggests a human made it.
I'm quite glad that using an 56k modem back in the days was a different experience than what this side shows here - at least in Germany and with my Elsa Microlink 56k modem.
I fondly remember the text of pages loading almost instantly over dialup, and then over time images popped in. If you were lucky the author included image sizes, so elements didn't resize and move around.
A modern website has so many round-trip things happening for ads, tracking, and whatever goes on behind the scenes for frameworks and services are used. A lot of this is multiple round trips and blocking so you have to wait to start reading, and if something times out the website fails to load.
Between about 2012 and 2020 I had a mobile phone plan that throttled to 100kbps when I ran out of data (which was often). Throughout that time google search and hackernews worked at that speed normally, but in that time period the percentage of websites that fail to ever load changed from about 25% to virtually 100%.
A while back, I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to roughly max dialup speeds https://dialup.moveything.com/. It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that are fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.
It uses rate limit buckets per-IP on the server side, applied before SSL termination so it doesn't include that overhead. If you open two tabs, they'll have to share. If your behind a NAT, you'll have to share with your NAT-mates. And, it also has headers saying not to cache anything, so you can continue to enjoy the experience.
A lot of people don’t know how cool it felt to dial into the internet or a service like Compuserve or Prodigy and suddenly have this whole world open up to you. Even at 56k.
You’re right, it just sucks. I don’t care how much AI anyone uses. It’s not that it’s “AI” slop, it’s slop. In this day and age we are almost certain AI was involved, but it has little to do with the criticism. It’s just a few short years ago we assume this kind of crap wouldn’t make it to the front page on the regular.
And the criticism isn’t even that it is off… things that are off can have artistic or entertainment value. This doesn’t. It’s just screams laziness.
I'm sure someone pointed this out in the other thread, but 56kpbs modems essentially didn't exist in 1996. They launched at the end of the year, cost a ton, and the manufacturers hadn't standardized the speeds, so it really didn't matter much as you weren't browsing AOL, MSN or Compuserve with it yet.
33.6k.rip is a harder domain name to get though, so I get it.
> the manufacturers hadn't standardized the speeds
Yeah, but there was pretty much two options x2 (usr) and kflex (everyone else). I dunno about AOL and those guys, but for ISPs (and BBSes), they'd list the speeds with their dial-up numbers, so if you had an x2 modem you'd try their x2 number, and if you had a kflex modem, you'd try their kflex number... If you liked your ISP, when they got 56k, you would buy a modem for the tech they picked... if you were choosing a new ISP, you'd pick one that supported the tech you had.
Switching ISPs was pretty easy back then, unless you were using ISP email, but local ISPs might set you up with email forwarding as you're leaving. So switching to get a better connection speed was a real thing. You might also switch because your ISP had too many busy signals, or because even though you connected at 56k, their upstream connection was overloaded or had poor routing and you had poor speeds to the rest of the world.
I agree with all of that - I'm just saying it must have happened in 1997 as the modems came out too late in 1996 to be particularly useful right away except maybe for your local BBS. I can't remember though - 30 years is a long time - so I'm willing to accept maybe I'm incorrect. I do remember how expensive the modems were - I don't think I ever upgraded, but instead got a DSL line.
My friends first modem was 1200 baud, mine 2400 and then I got the 9600 baud one. 56 kpbs was a pipe dream. Another friend had it but it was barely ever able to connect at full speed due to the quality of the line.
That reminds me. Can we standardize cypress tests to load the website via a restricted speed as one of the tests? Some of of our modern webpages are still slow on the latest iPhone/Pixel/Samsung over 5G.
8,600,743 bytes of assets and frameworks later I'm finally able to see your contact-us address.
It has all the warts of the early internet era: you can program a virus, get people to download it, delete their documents, etc., but it also has a lot of the charm, build a website, chat with strangers, enjoy the lack of facebook (for now until someone builds it).
1: https://sim95.kippy.io/
lol, well done
Honestly, thank you, though, for actually building something with this. I never thought anyone would use it for real.
A BIND/DNS service built in so we can point multiple hosts to a single machine (the 5 tabs are burning my browser).
The ability to modify the core OS a bit. Would be fun to work on skins, change default behavior, or add capabilities into the Spark language itself. would love to add screenshot capabilities for screenshare service.
midi/audio sys calls.
I hadn't even planned on releasing this yet, it's been a weekend project for the last few months, that I try to add one thing each time. Lately I've been working on software for it, I was going to create a better IDE. A mix of VB6 and FrontPage, but I keep getting distracted by other weekend projects.
You could just become ICANN and allow anyone to host any TLD they want and keep certain TLDs reserved for yourself/own vetted projects.
I feel like "in-game currency" changes the goal of the system a bit. Though I have considered building PaySimPal service. So maybe not?
I think right now, what resonates with me in this project is just how open and buildable everything is. No forcing function to do things a certain way. Like I was about to go build a basic BIND service to serve DNS traffic over and let my Internet Explorer browser use it for host name resolution. Just, that means only people on IE would be able to view my beautiful works of art.
Do it, and I can back port that to the voyager, but the biggest thing this needs is the ability to run a server "headless" so people can start building infrastructure and leaving it running without the browser tab being open. But I love the idea that their tab closing actually turns off their server resulting in an outage.
I added a Show HN[1] if you want to discuss on their, I highlighted some of your sites, but I guess they've moved, now.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49921544
Simbook, ColdMail (email server, website for mail), Frostbird (a spark program for checking emails), AskSim (an ask jeeves search engine that actually crawls all of the machines in the network), Simxplorer (An IE browser with a javascript engine built into it), ELIZA (the preLLM chatbot with silly responses), Vapor (a Steam like program downloader that also has Doom and Snake). I'm toying around with a Clippy idea but haven't landed on if I like it or not.
tl;dr I'm having way too much fun
The icons do not even look remotely close to the dial-up computers.
When it disconnects, the reconnection sound is not that at all. Pages load too fast.
How can you have DSL (connecting through WAN Miniport PPPoE) and dial up modem sounds at the same time? Infuriating...
The "display settings" also claims it is set to 256 colour while the display is clearly far more colours than that too.
(When did this change? Around 2012?)
I don’t remember if my computer at the time had built-in Ethernet or if I had to buy a card.
I have been always-online ever since. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
But I do still miss the BBS scene.
A few bad moves and it’s been quite a subjective fall.
2012 is a good date for roaming internet, although for the plans and places I’ve been it’s only been the last 3 or so years that roaming internet has been mostly reliable.
Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.
I mean, you can still have this: by 1. Not being Chronically Online and 2. Not worrying so much or watching what is going on online.
I’ve managed to keep the separation between “online” and “the real world.” Mostly by just not participating or caring about social media. Online only invades Real Life to the extent that you allow it to.
There might be someone over on Instagram “canceling” me right now! I have no idea because I don’t even have an account there.
It's hard to not attribute the current political climate and all its downwind effects to the online world affecting the real world, and that political climate is affecting me and most people I know, whether I like it or not.
I'm happy for you that it's not affecting you.
There's 'offline by default at home' and 'offline by default overall'. And it can blur.
At least as far as 'offline by default at home'
After (1) my dad retired and bought a brand new fancy PC with some of his unused leave time [0] we wound up getting a dial-up account [1] but sometime around 1998/1999 [2] we wound up just getting a secondary phone line; somehow the 'internet' was so magical to all of us kids or young adults, that it was better for our parent's budget to just pay for the extra phone line.
Still, it wasn't even 56K. Phone lines in my area of Detroit were garbage, if it did connect at 56K it was unstable as hell, 28.8 was the 'reliable' connection rate, to the point you prayed that was what it connected at.
For 'offline overall' the change can be more blurry, at least in my head. I blame work phones, my PSP's WiFi capabilities, and the HTC Dream (released 2008) as the slow shift for me.
FWIW, I did enjoy my time on WinPho, where the siloing of the OS and lack of apps, led to a quieter time where my phone was a 'phone' (and honestly, still a better one at calls, SMS, or driving navigation than than my current one) rather than be tempted by anything online.
It's weird to think about. Before I went to college, Online (thanks to that dial-up) was an escape from the prison of my home and where I lived. But now Online feels more like a tug away from enjoying life.
[0] - P2 266 MHZ 32MB Ram, 2(? might have been 4) GB HDD...
[1] - Thanks Diablo for the WorldNet trial and thanks WorldNet for having the practically unlimited usage thing [4]
[2] - My oldest Sister was Driving home from College and the engine on the car blew up while I was online. She couldn't call for help. [3]
[3] - How's that for a technology shift though, as far as taking things for granted (i.e. call waiting being seamless and not costing extra per month.)
[4] - Except for the bit where when AT&T somehow figured out we were using a 'Share-dial-up-over-LAN' a few years later, had to switch to Mindspring after dad had me do the research.
Also riddled with inaccuracies.
whalers*
But there ain't no whales, So we tell tall tales, And sing our whaling tune!
Back when I was 12, I installed linux on an old 386 to set up a little server. I remember writing the connection script to get on the internet. I still wonder how I learned to do that. Still a mystery! But those were the days when you just figured things out.
This same chat space connects to the windows desktop chat too
iirc ISDN did require a special phone line, but 56k was fine over regular lines.
Sort of. The quality/length of your local loop made a difference.
And heck, 56k being able to do 56k in the first place was dependent on not having a "regular" line between the ISP and their central office (CO), but rather it being digital, whereas the line from the user to their CO was always analog. Removing a set of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions in the ISP -> user path was what allowed the download speed to reach 56k. Upload was limited to 33.6k because it included an additional set of conversions and introduced more errors, prohibiting the higher speed.
This shows getting up to 56k over normal phone lines was indeed tricky.
You only got max speeds where the noise was low enough.
If your line was noisy good luck. If your line had loading coils in the path between the CO and you, that would help your voice calls but make 56k harder to achieve (and was definitely problematic for DSL). Most telephone lines had loading coils every wire mile between the CO and the customer. If you had any of the older wonky stuff telcos used to magic more pairs for customers out of thin air, chances are they wouldn't work at 56k.
I remember calling AT&T (or maybe it was SBC by then) about flat out unreliability of our internet connection and the answer was "If you can carry a voice call, we do not care".
FWIW, the problem with our lines did eventually get so bad (although, we finally had cable internet by then) that even a voice call was unusable. Turned out one of the runs (not even the drop to our house) was allowing water to get into the lines. and that was the cause.
Will add, after they fixed that problem was when they got really aggressive about marketing DSL...
Nowadays, good luck getting a dial tone. Afaik, no telco actually cares about phones these days.
sometimes you'd also reconnect because the handshake got messed up and you'd connect at 33.6 instead of 'real' 56k
Today, startmenu is showing me Xbox & videos on a MS server installation.
Launches a command prompt, just like I hoped it would. Nice.
https://internethistoryroulette.com/
- could be improved whereby the "facts" bubbles change too quickly when turned on.
But the idea of placing a random site in an iframe would also work well for Show HN.
Other than that, this is such a blast from the past.
A modern website has so many round-trip things happening for ads, tracking, and whatever goes on behind the scenes for frameworks and services are used. A lot of this is multiple round trips and blocking so you have to wait to start reading, and if something times out the website fails to load.
Between about 2012 and 2020 I had a mobile phone plan that throttled to 100kbps when I ran out of data (which was often). Throughout that time google search and hackernews worked at that speed normally, but in that time period the percentage of websites that fail to ever load changed from about 25% to virtually 100%.
It uses rate limit buckets per-IP on the server side, applied before SSL termination so it doesn't include that overhead. If you open two tabs, they'll have to share. If your behind a NAT, you'll have to share with your NAT-mates. And, it also has headers saying not to cache anything, so you can continue to enjoy the experience.
And the criticism isn’t even that it is off… things that are off can have artistic or entertainment value. This doesn’t. It’s just screams laziness.
33.6k.rip is a harder domain name to get though, so I get it.
Yeah, but there was pretty much two options x2 (usr) and kflex (everyone else). I dunno about AOL and those guys, but for ISPs (and BBSes), they'd list the speeds with their dial-up numbers, so if you had an x2 modem you'd try their x2 number, and if you had a kflex modem, you'd try their kflex number... If you liked your ISP, when they got 56k, you would buy a modem for the tech they picked... if you were choosing a new ISP, you'd pick one that supported the tech you had.
Switching ISPs was pretty easy back then, unless you were using ISP email, but local ISPs might set you up with email forwarding as you're leaving. So switching to get a better connection speed was a real thing. You might also switch because your ISP had too many busy signals, or because even though you connected at 56k, their upstream connection was overloaded or had poor routing and you had poor speeds to the rest of the world.
Now we just need to bring back BBS’s and the daily turn based games. Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, etc.
Some were asking: a/s/l hahahaha
Select modem mode and just hurt.
8,600,743 bytes of assets and frameworks later I'm finally able to see your contact-us address.