Mashable: The best internet moments of 2025 (so far) . “From Pope Crave live-tweeting the papal conclave to Labubu’s rise as the It-girl of modern capitalism, the timeline has once again proven that literally anything can become a cultural event if it happens in front of a camera. This was the year we mourned a deep-sea anglerfish that swam to the surface and died like a tragic little oracle, […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/06/20/mashable-the-best-internet-moments-of-2025-so-far/

Finding Dead Websites

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_122_dead_websites/

This week's Cybercultural article looks back on 1998, the year of the portal: Excite, Netscape Netcenter, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and others all competing for eyeballs and trying to be sticky. But with so many portals, some inevitably failed. https://cybercultural.com/p/portals-1998/ #InternetHistory

In 1997, the first browser war began amid new internet trends like 'push' and DHTML. Meanwhile, instant messaging apps like ICQ and AIM became popular and GeoCities achieved 1 million users. cybercultural.com/p/internet-1... #InternetHistory

What the Internet Was Like in ...

In 1997, the first browser war began amid new internet trends like 'push' and DHTML. Meanwhile, instant messaging apps like ICQ and AIM became popular and GeoCities achieved 1 million users. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-1997/ #InternetHistory

https://youtube.com/shorts/r-ToXvkQihs?si=IF2ZQ5hFywppouMv

Andrew Tate says Free Greta Thunberg
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#AndrewTate #GretaThunberg #ViralMoments #InternetHistory #Controversy #SocialMedia #ClimateActivism #OnlineInfluence #LegalTroubles #2022Recap #InternetCulture #ViralTweets #SarcasmWins #InfluencerDrama #DigitalAge

Remember those "best experienced with [browser name]" badges?

"MTV's revamped World Wide Web site for MTV contains a heavy amount of original music content and a unique Web browser design. [...] Some of the site's best content, including a grossly appealing game with Beavis & Butt-head, is designed exclusively for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser."

https://cybercultural.com/p/browser-war-1990s/

"I want my MTV...as long as it's the Java version in IE4."

MTV's website in 1997 was a hodgepodge of technologies: Java, JavaScript, frames and more. The quality of your user experience depended on which browser you used: Netscape or IE. https://cybercultural.com/p/browser-war-1990s/ #InternetHistory #BrowserWar

Now this is a detail I hadn’t known about the launch of Netscape Navigator in December 1994. From ‘Speeding the Net’, a 1998 book about Netscape by Quittner and Slatalla. #InternetHistory

Flash Back: An "oral" history of Flash

https://goodinternetmagazine.com/oral-history-of-flash/

I look back on the 3 musketeers of web design in the 1990s: Jeffrey Zeldman, David Siegel, and Jakob Nielsen. Each had a distinct web design philosophy (and if you read till the end, you'll discover which one I believe 'won' in the long term). I focus in particular on 1997, which is when Flash and CSS emerged. But I also look back on the careers of the 3 gurus from our 2025 perspective. https://cybercultural.com/p/web-design-1997/ #InternetHistory #WebDesign

Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1021871/4bec46993258f6b7/

From Hosts.txt to Modern Internet Infrastructure

https://axonshield.com/from-hoststxt-to-modern-internet-infrastructure

Back in 1997, the browser plugin RealPlayer became synonymous with "buffering" — which for 90s web users meant constant, annoying delays in streaming a video online (usually over dial-up). Funnily enough though, the buffering epidemic didn't dampen the HYPE for online video streaming that year. Wired magazine even declared that RealVideo was leading a “war with TV.” And you thought AI hype was bad... https://cybercultural.com/p/video-streaming-1997/ #InternetHistory #VideoStreaming

The ISP that David Bowie ran for eight years https://hackaday.com/2025/05/19/remembering-the-isp-that-david-bowie-ran-for-eight-years

Internet Artifacts

https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/

This week's #InternetHistory post on Cybercultural was an excuse to revisit my favourite boyhood band, Duran Duran. Back in 1997, they became the first major label artist to offer an online single for sale. This was a couple of years before Napster and more than 5 years before the iTunes Store! It was all thanks to a couple of now mostly forgotten companies: N2K and Liquid Audio. Full story: https://cybercultural.com/p/digital-music-sales-1997/ #DuranDuran #90s

Today I stumbled across a date-stamped set of instructions for "Scepter of Goth" (Scepter), the world's first commercial MMORPG, from September of 1982. We eventually franchised Scepter, and some of our franchisees went on to build the MMORPG industry (while I went on in 1991 to write Internet Gopher, the first Internet browser).

You can play Scepter at
ssh -p 2233 muinet@muinet.com password muinet
Create a free account and look under "BBS Games"
#history #internethistory #mmorpg #mmorpghistory

Wrapping up the 1996 series on Cybercultural, in this post I look at web portals, the continued rise of e-commerce, CSS and Flash arriving on the scene for web designers, and the emergence of web applications from Netscape. Starting next week, I'll be diving into 1997 internet history. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-1996/ #InternetHistory

This day 30 years ago, a new employee at Netscape named Brendan Eich was hard at work creating a web scripting language called Mocha. It would soon be re-named JavaScript, in a dubious attempt to co-brand it with another new web programming language from May 1995, Java. https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/

p.s. according to @allenwb and Eich: "There is no known record of the specific dates but Brendan Eich believes it was May 6–15." https://zenodo.org/records/3707008#.X6XOHVMzbDo