ADVENTURES WITH PROTOWEB

Exploring the 90s Internet

To start, I am a massive nerd. I'd call myself something else, but nerd is the best way to describe it. My dad once called me the nerdiest person in our family, and that's saying something, because he knows the different subgenres of science-fiction books. Anyway, to Protoweb. I found out about Protoweb from this video and thought it looked pretty cool. I've tried things like the Wayback Machine and The Old Net before, but getting it running on actual Windows 98/2000 OS is even better. So, I set up a Virtual Machine running Windows 2000 Professional and had a look.

The Protoweb homepage is pretty cool, but one thing that stood out to me was it saying that there were over 11,000 webrings available to browse. I tried to find any related to "videogames" or "football" but found out there weren't any under that tag, but I did find a couple under "horror", specifically "horrorguy" and "horrorfilm".

The first website was a review site for horror films. Some of the reviews were pretty funny, including one for Jaws that said the shark looked "very real" (No it didn't) and a review for The Blair Witch Project that said the film was bad because there were no "visible monsters or special effects". Yeah, I know what would make the film better, a GREAT GILA MONSTER!! I'm joking, but 90s horror film reviewers weren't!

The second website I found somehow through some random links page, as it wasn't under any of the "horror" tags. Unfortunately, basically none of the reviews actually work, so I can't see what probably would have been great reviews for Scream, The Evil Dead and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The Holiday Guide is pretty entertaining, just because the videogames listed are Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid.

I did also find some other websites including: A Freddy vs Jason fansite, a slasher film fansite and a site straight from Hypnospace Outlaw maintained by some guy called Rick about trucks. That was only funny to me because of this image.

A good place to find these types of websites (other than Protoweb itself) is here. Protoweb also has a browser to experience the full 90s internet browser experience, but I'd recommend running it on an actual OS like Windows 98, 2000 or some MacOS (I've never used MacOS, so I don't know what would be one 'of the time'.)