Recreating the Ancient Internet

Photo credit: Toronto Public Library

There have been a lot of stories recently mainly in the US but also starting to filter down in to other countries like Canada and the UK, where the extreme right are going insane about libraries. We always knew these conservative types were really just « old man spooked by change » but the attacks on public spaces are dipping back into that era of « shit we learned the hard way in the 1940s ».

Anyways, because quite frankly I’m mentally not able to handle literally everything that’s going on right now, I decided to get drunk on Nostalgia and really go for it by huffing the glue that is the early internet. Granted it doesn’t have the same edge as it did then, walking into the public library and writing some absolute clangers on AngelFire or Tripod, but I felt the need to just obsessively find those sweet downloads.

Because the BBS is running on a very old machine and I have zero fucking respect for PrOdUcTiOn SyStEms, I installed AOL Press. If you don’t remember what that was, AOL created their own homepage maker back in 1997 as people flooded to experiment with personal homepages. Really anything to keep people racking up those billable hours. AOL was a lot of shitty things, but they had a knack for creating the right tool at the right time.

Compuserve also had a good one, I think it might have been one of the first desktop publishing applications (other than Microsoft Frontpage) that I got my hands on, the only problem with that one vs AOL Press was that you couldn’t easily generate your own HTML files. They had a preview, but to get it working right you needed a Compuserve account and to use their publishing wizard.

I’m still working on what I want to really do here, as the AOL Press version I have is really a tiny bit broken. I imagine it might be the somewhat subtle changes from the OG Win XP to say, Windows 95 first edition with a lot of vulnerabilities that let things look nice while being an utter security nightmare (in hindsight)

This also kind of fits in my overall theme with mmn.ca where I have super great ideas but then just get stuck in a post capitalism / nostalgic dread space where my burnt out creativity just struggles to get firing. I blame TikTok really.