👀 Welcome to the 1990s…

#115 | ...and a design aesthetic that endures

I know I’m always talking about how the Internet was in the days of yore. The fantastic design, the colour choices, the fonts, the sense of community… it was all fabulous. Okay, maybe not the fonts or colours or the design. But the community… now that was super awesome.

People on the Internet back then were not as invested in shouting others down as they are today. Possibly because getting online wasn’t as easy. And bandwidth was precious. Made sense to optimise your time for good. Not that there weren’t your regular, everyday assholes. There were. But the troll farms and dogpiles that pass off for discourse on Twitter and Facebook today? Those didn’t exist to the degree they do now.

But the best part of the old Internet (the 1990s especially) was the filez. Everybody had those. And everybody shared those. With everybody else. Docs, video, audio, images… everything was of and for the community. Everything was for everybody.

And today’s post is about a recently launched initiative cataloguing some of that history. Called (aptly enough) Discmaster. I mean, so ’90s, eh?

So, what is Discmaster, then? A browsable, searchable collection of all the files the 100,000 or so people who were on the Internet back then used to swap with each other. Okay, maybe not all but a large bunch of files, nevertheless. Over 90 million of them.

Built for maximum compatibility with every possible browser and with a design aesthetic straight outta circa 199x, Discmaster is the place to find that text-based game for your DOS-based device. Or that MIDI file that haunts your dreams. Or that 8-bit image your uncle told you about that went viral because at least 100 people saw it.

Be warned: there is a lot of NSFW stuff on Discmaster, helpfully labelled NSFW. But if you want to experience a tiny bit of what the Internet was like, do visit. Maybe you’ll even fall in love with a game you didn’t even know existed.

Baaa.

Dolly