Gopher – Gopher was one of the old Internet protocols before the WWW. It imposed a much stricter hierarchy on content, which had to be placed in folders and indexed with a text menu. It only lasted from 1991 to 1993. here is a list of still-functioning Gopher servers – amongst others, Firefox has a Gopher protocol. And here is an Ars Technica writeup on what the Gopher-heads are up to now.

BBS Banners – Just about the most amazing cultural Internat art ever, these were character graphic images done in ASCII or ANSI characters, which, when you dialed into a bulletin board system, would gradually scroll up welcoming you with all kinds of surprising artwork. Most of the graphic artists in the BBS community worked for free or little money; many are forgotten forever now. Here’s a whole gallery of rendered BBS art.

“Under Construction” GIFs – There was practically a whole subculture just revolving around animated gifs in the early web days. Believe it or not, you saw these things every day in the mid-’90s web. A whole gallery of Under Construction GIFs.

Old Portable Gadgets – Old digital gizmos were not much better than a programmable calculator with a hyperthyroid problem, but they’re amazing to revisit now. A blog devoted to cataloging these, called It Ain’t Dead Yet, has lots of shots that will jog your memory. Crikey! Is that a Timex Sinclair 1000?

Unix System Manuals – If you went to college in the 1970s and took comp-sci, chances are at some point you found yourself thumbing through stacks of manuals in a room full of noisy PDPs and Vaxes. Relive those days with this collection of original Unix First Edition Man Pages. Complete with a page for ‘b’, the compiler for the B programming language! What, you didn’t think they started with C, did you?

Peter Brittain
Digital Agency