Rant: That old Web1.0 fan site for my city was actually a goldmine

I was cleaning out my garage last Saturday and found a CD-R labeled "Orlando 1997." I popped it into my old laptop and it had all these screenshots I saved from a local fan site called Orlando Underground. It had maps of closed arcades, photos from the old Church Street Station, and a listing of every indie record store that shut down by 2000. I spent like 4 hours digging through my bookmarks on the Wayback Machine and found most of the original pages still archived. It made me realize how much local history is just rotting on old Geocities pages. Has anyone else dug up their hometown from those old fan sites and found something they forgot existed?

2 comments

2 Comments

hannahs7113d agoMost Upvoted

oh come on, it's a GOOD thing those old sites are rotting. most of them were ugly messes with bad info and broken links anyway. i swear everyone romanticizes the web1.0 era but forgets how much of it was just people typing wrong facts and posting blurry photos of their cat. the Wayback Machine is great but it's basically digital hoarding at this point

thompson.christopher13d ago

Found most of them on Geocities too, but Orlando Underground was actually a Tripod site. I remember because I had to fight with that stupid Tripod popup ad every time I loaded a page. Spent a whole night last year pulling up old pages of a site called "DC's Hidden Bars" from 1999. Found a mention of a basement punk venue that I used to swear existed but nobody else remembered. The Wayback Machine is great but it misses a lot of the broken image links and dead audio files that made those sites feel alive.