OldWeb

There's been a few minor updates, but it's largely unchanged since 2009. If you want to see a horror show, view page source for a taste of how bad web dev used to be. Bunch of autogenerated garbage from Microsoft Publisher 11 like this:

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MS Publisher also screwed up the title into this 🤦:

MayDay� Books

Modern web dev has its downsides but it's still streets ahead of when it was under the iron grip of Microsoft (or M$ as you used to say back in the day if you were cool on /.)

Look at it all. The low-res background that doesn't scale right. All the styled UI as just tables of images. The awkward typography.

Hey all. I've not been on here for a while, but had an itch for a specific kind of website.

Remember that 2000s feeling of just being online, talking with others, watching flash animations, posting in forums, etc? Now that everything has gone overly corporate and the internet isn't what it once was, I'm wondering if there are still sites out there that any of you use, that give that same feeling.

I'm talking about sites you can interact with, whether it be forums, chat sites, etc. I just want that old school internet feel where not everything is bogged down with rules, over moderation etc. But where people have fun, post memes, and have managed to hold on to that old internet culture, if that makes any sense!

Basically, i'm looking for a site where the old internet users went and didn't leave.

Two comments in particular stand out:

This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think. posted by Doug at 8:51 AM on September 11, 2001 [207 favorites +] [!]

my greatest fear is how our government is going to respond. more erosion of freedom in the name of security. mark my words. posted by rebeccablood at 12:10 PM on September 11, 2001 [311 favorites +] [!]

Two comments in particular stand out:

This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think. posted by Doug at 8:51 AM on September 11, 2001 [207 favorites +] [!]

my greatest fear is how our government is going to respond. more erosion of freedom in the name of security. mark my words. posted by rebeccablood at 12:10 PM on September 11, 2001 [311 favorites +] [!]

Way, way back when the internet was still being charted as if it was some mysterious country, one of my favorite things to do was just to spend a solid chunk of time on StumbleUpon -- bouncing from random website to random website. It was such a useful tool for just finding niche sites, some of which I still use to this day.

This site will send you to a random IndieWeb site and even has RSS feeds to send a set amount of random blog entries to your feed. Glad that there's still sites like this out there in the ether!

https://indieblog.page/

So I've just checked and there's 350 subscribers which is just mad to me. Sure the sub isn't really that active, but I can tell the interest in these sorts of old style and personal websites is definitely there!

Feel like I haven't posted much for a little while and wanted to make this post to say thanks to everyone who's joined so far and posted some really cool sites.

I've kind of just made this community but not really looked into anything further like modding or asking what people actually want. So if anyone has any suggestions or even want to come on board and help out, please let me know!

All sorts in here, emulators, software, personal sites etc.

This site is a huge collection of simulation applets for analog circuit, filters, acoustics, general harmonic stuff, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, linear algebra, and so on.

The analog circuit simulator in particular is very feature rich. I have used it to design some synth circuits in lieu of/addition to breadboarding.

Also try the acoustics ones, especially the ripple tank. The examples drop down has a bunch of cool setups like speaker designs, mirrors, lenses, mechanical filters(!), and can even simulate temperature (impedance) gradients.

I’ve had this page bookmarked for like 15 years and I go back to it every once in a while and have my mind blown.

This one is Ray Wilson's DIY synthesizer website.

I first saw him on youtube, screwing around with an echo rockit noise box. I was hypnotized.

I found his site and was hooked. I spent the next couple years making synthesizer modules at a manic pace.

The magical thing about Ray's site is is his teaching style. He gives the circuit schematics, but also explanations of how/why they work in language that is pretty easy to understand. He really approaches electronics from a practical standpoint rather than what you'd get in an intro class somewhere. This website was my introduction to electronics, and it can get you far when it comes to understanding analog design and signal processing.

You can really get a feel for Ray's personality from his writing on the site. He died in 2016, and I weirdly get a little choked up when I look at that echo rockit page. His website was a right-time-right-place thing for me, and it helped change the trajectory of my life in a very real way.

Anyways. Check out Music From Outer Space, and like Ray would say, Good learning...

This is the website of Gene Slover (now deceased). He was a firecontrolman in the navy back in the day. Now I don't care about the navy, nor do I really care about Gene. What I do care about is mechanical computers.

Firecontrolman in this context is the dude who operated the Mk 1 fire control computer on navy ships. Gene's website is significant to me because it has a massive amount of information on the design and operation of that computer.

It's wild to me that information this detailed is out there, cataloged by someone who actually operated the system.

Here's a short writeup that I posted elsewhere to explain why I think the computer is so cool:

The mark 1 fire control computer is an entirely mechanical computer that reads in the speed of the ship in water, the wind direction and speed, the pitch and roll from waves, the ballistic characteristics of the guns all the way down to how worn in the barrels were, and so on. Then a gun director feeds it the bearing, elevation, and distance to a target, and it does that rapidly so the computer can establish a vector.

So at one end you have a guy with a telescope/rangefinder that he points at the incoming plane, and that's all mechanically connected through a calculating machine that aims the guns the right direction, sets the fuzes to the right distance, and applies "corrections for gravity, relative wind, the magnus effect of the spinning projectile, and parallax" so that the shells explore right on a plane that zooming by.

They did all that with levers, cams, gears, mechanical integrators, etc. And they made that super complex machine reliable enough that it was used in a loss-of-life application. That's some pretty badass engineering imo

Here is a much more in depth page about it than the Wikipedia entry: https://eugeneleeslover.com/USNAVY/CHAPTER-25-C.html

And his page has a flow diagram that shows all of the inputs, intermediate quantities and outputs of the thing. I wish I could actually read them :( https://eugeneleeslover.com/USN-GUNS-AND-RANGE-TABLES/FLOW-SCHEMATIC-COMPUTER-MK-1MOD-7.html

I mean check this shit out. They had an adjustable integration step size so that you could manually adjust to balance between firing solution speed and accuracy:

The rate control system of Computer Mark 1A includes sensitivity units which control the time required by the computer to reduce errors in generated rates to the point where the corrected rates are sufficiently accurate to compute adequate gun orders. Sensitivity may be thought of as the speed with which the errors are corrected by the rate control mechanism. If the errors are corrected within a relatively short time interval, the sensitivity is considered to be high, and if the errors are corrected within a relatively long time interval, the sensitivity is considered to be low.

Blows my mind.

This section of the Project Rho site is one that I have actually used for real projects in the past. The section gives guidelines for creating nomograms, or alignment charts.

Nomograms are graphical representations of a math equation. For a basic 3 variable equation, given 2 of the variables, you simply lay a straight edge across the chart to read the answer from the 3rd scale.

The specific page I linked is a cheatsheet of "standard forms". If you can manipulate your equation into one of these forms, then making it into a nomogram is trivial.

This page is one of very few resources online that will take you step by step through building a nomogram. The intended purpose of the page is to be a resource for board game designers, but I have found it useful in creating time/distance/speed nomograms, various engineering calculations, and calculators for film photography and darkroom printing.

Even if you aren't a math nerd, I hope you find the idea of a graphical representation of an equation as fascinating as I do. It doesn't tell you the answer to 1 question, it tells you the answer to all the questions that an equation can answer simultaneously.

This site has been around forever. It gained popularity for a while when the Google search algorithm had it ranking highly for a lot of terms. That went away for some unknown reason with an algorithm update, but the site is still plugging along, its users cranking out quality posts every single day.

An old school vibe with lots of links to random useless websites.

I haven't had a good look at this one, but there's tons of links in here.