~ Early Web Links ~

People and Blogs is a weekly newsletter series created by Manu that spotlights interesting individuals and their personal blogs through interview-style profiles. The archive features hundreds of bloggers and their sites, making it a rich discovery resource for anyone looking to explore the indie web beyond social media.

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.

A massive audio archive from the textfiles.com project, collecting historical recordings from the early internet and hacker culture including conference speeches, phone phreaking pranks, and computer-themed music. Curated by Jason Scott, this repository preserves rare sound artifacts from hacker cons like DEF CON, telephone conferences, and other digital history ephemera.

Juanita Ville's personal link collection organizes dozens of categories spanning astronomy, crafts, diet, entertainment, health, and webmaster tools in a classic Tripod-era style. A compact but eclectic curated directory from the early web era, it offers quick-access links to everything from UFO sites and horoscopes to webcams and retirement resources.

A hosted academic paper by Amy Bruckman and Mitchel Resnick examining MediaMOO, a text-based virtual reality environment launched in 1993 to build professional community among media researchers worldwide. The paper explores constructionist learning philosophy applied to virtual world design, arguing that user-built environments foster deeper engagement and community than pre-designed ones.

Ripped is a community-curated guide to trusted sites and tools for ripping and archiving media, covering everything from CD audio ripping with EAC to manga, e-books, games, anime, and movies. It serves as a structured reference directory for private trackers, scene terminology, and platform-specific software across PC, Android, iOS, and consoles.

The official NetBSD/macppc FAQ covers everything a user needs to install and run NetBSD on PowerPC-based Apple hardware, from booting and partitioning to Open Firmware, supported hardware models, and peripheral configuration. With dozens of detailed questions and answers spanning networking, ADB keyboards, USB devices, and kernel options, it serves as an indispensable technical reference for running this Unix-like OS on older Power Macs and PowerBooks.

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 Archive Team wiki page documenting the GeoCities Project, a coordinated mass effort to rescue and preserve data from Yahoo's GeoCities before its shutdown in October 2009. It covers the technical details of the crawl, the volunteers involved, and the parallel efforts with archive.org, making it a valuable historical record of one of the web's most significant preservation projects.

ASCII.co.uk is a comprehensive hub for everything related to ASCII, offering art galleries, an ASCII code converter, symbol tables, URL encoding tools, and a text generator. Whether you're looking to explore user-created ASCII art, generate stylized text banners, or reference character codes, this site covers the full spectrum of plain-text culture.