~ Early Web Links ~

Ichipedia is a growing wiki-style reference site covering topics like the small-net, small-tech tools, the modern web, and the Gemini protocol. It invites contributors and aims to become a curated knowledge base for niche corners of internet culture and alternative technology.

Old'aVista is a nostalgic search engine built specifically for finding old websites from classic hosting services like Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and AOL, complete with a retro AltaVista-inspired interface. It indexes a massive database of vintage web content and offers curated directories, top searches, and links to preservation resources like the Internet Archive.

The Online Books Page, edited by John Mark Ockerbloom and hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, catalogs over 3 million freely available books on the web, searchable by author, title, subject, and serial. It features curated collections highlighting women writers, banned books, and prize winners, making it one of the most comprehensive free ebook directories on the internet.

A quirky personal links page from a Tripod-era site called 'Voodoo Chicken Bones,' collecting favorite websites with irreverent commentary on topics ranging from America's Most Wanted and Harry Turtledove novels to ninja humor and alien cow abductions. The writing is tongue-in-cheek throughout, with goofy asides about Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett, and fictional rich people rankings, giving the whole page a distinctly early-2000s comedic personality.

Galaxy/eiNet claims the title of the web's original searchable directory, launched in January 1994 before Yahoo or Google existed. Organized into broad topic hierarchies covering community, business, humanities, travel, government, and more, it remains a curated human-edited index of web listings in the classic old-web tradition.

Curated by Jason Scott of Textfiles.com fame, this archive collects and preserves a wide variety of PDF documents spanning academics, vintage zines, legal threats, technical manuals, pamphlets, and printable paper models. It serves as a fascinating digital library of internet ephemera, offering everything from classic books to fan magazines and digitized historical catalogs.

The Jargon File is the legendary online lexicon of hacker slang, culture, and folklore, maintained by Eric S. Raymond (ESR) and covering everything from technical terminology to the sociology of hacker life. Version 4.4.7 includes a full glossary, essays on hacker writing and speech styles, appendices on hacker folklore, and a detailed portrait of hacker culture that has made this one of the most cited references in computing history.

Edited by Paul Wise and Jed Wing, this unofficial specification documents Microsoft's HTML Help system in exhaustive technical detail, covering the CHM file format, LZX compression, XML structure, and all associated configuration options. Reverse-engineered without NDA restrictions and released under the GNU GPL, it serves as a rare open reference for developers working with or building tools around the proprietary .chm format.

A.H.Links is an early 2000s web directory billing itself as 'the doorway to the Internet,' organizing hundreds of popular sites into categorized link collections covering everything from airlines and auctions to recipes and religion. The site also features a ranked Top 100 list of the hottest websites of the era, making it a fascinating time capsule of the early web landscape.

Jason Scott's web.textfiles.com is a sprawling archive of historical text files covering hacking, phreaking, e-zines, humor, virus research, and underground computing culture from the BBS era and beyond. It's an essential digital preservation project cataloging thousands of documents that capture the raw, unfiltered voice of early internet and hacker subcultures.