zombo.com was launched in 1999. I remember in high school you'd see the new fancy web kiosk's the school put up just displaying it as a joke. and being locked out of the address bar so you couldn't change it.
The fact that this url has been renewed, maintained, and updated with all the advancements web browsers have made in the last 24 years, just to have this useless site still exist amuses me to no end.
It’s very interesting and almost kind of sad to me that ‘kids these days’ I think truly don’t get how… scrabbly the early internet was. It was this truly and genuinely unique environment where people were kind of scrapping things together into things that probably just they thought were funny or cool, and then just kind of sending it out into the world.
It’s so different from today where advanced algorithms and profitability guidelines have co-opted that almost anarchic environment
Back then you didn't find those sites through search engines. You found them through word of mouth.
Today, the people around you just don't share sites like this anymore.
updated with all the advancements web browsers have made in the last 24 years
That's one of the neat parts of the web-- it's very backwards compatible. Maybe they upgraded to https when that became a thing, but the maintenance costs of a site that small/simple are fairly low. Still, it shows that someone cares enough to keep it going!
I took a look, they updated their FontAwesome dependency sometime in 2016-ish and their site looks good on mobile. Looks like they do occasionally update it after all.
I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.
That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn't stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that's why zombo.com still works.
I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I'm saying. Return to monke, is what I'm saying.
Okay, while we're talking about really old novelty websites, I've got one I remember, but can't find. The best way I can describe it is "organic paisley Flash." It was just a lot of colorful alien-biological shapes that, when you clicked on certain parts of them, would move around and change in an animated transition to another weird abstract scene.