Richard Bettridge

I'm creating the old net again. It's kind of hard but I think we can do it. Please check it out at: <a href="http://theoldnet.com">http://theoldnet.com</a> The Old Net allows new computers and vintage computers to surf old websites care of Archive.org. It is not possible for old web browsers to use Archive.org's massive collection of old websites because of compatibility problems with the modern web.  I made this project so that I could browse the internet on my 10 or so (and growing) collection of 90's era computers. This ended up working so well for me that I kept building features on top of the original concept and decided to open it up to the world.  I'm very pleased to see that people are enjoying it as much as I am. As of my original Patreon post on April 17th 2019, 166,925 Page Views from 9,227 Visitors have been served. As of July 2nd 2019, 758,096 Page Views from 40,362 Visitors have been served! Thanks to a curated list of links provided by users around the world you can now get more value out of the Internet Archive than ever before. Homepages like Geocities and AOL Homepages are automatically detected whenever a user like you discovers it. Meaning some of the best content of the internet surfaces to the top. Over 200 different web-browsers have used The Old Net at this point, ranging from the very first Cern Browser, to Netscape 0.9, Mosaic, all the way up to Chrome. 200 is a surprising number of browser types since I'm grouping all versions of Chrome and all variants of Mozilla 5.0 into one group.  Old Computers can browse the archive due to many hours on my part put into making the snap-shotted content compliant with javascript, headers and character-sets of their era. New Computers can browse the archive in a way that has never been presented before. I've created a web-browser using the assets out of the original Netscape 3.0 source code to provide a convincing experience at the current Beta: <a href="http://theoldnet.com/browser/">http://theoldnet.com/browser/ </a>This is more than just a cosmetic skin. You'll notice that when you click on links the browser logo animates and the progress bar grows. This is because instead of your browser handling the network request this is being done in javascript and uses events handlers to update the user interface as the page loads. Without this the Stop button, for example, would not work. All of the buttons in the nav bar work and do something practical.  I am also working on a stand alone version of the browser using <a href="https://electronjs.org/">https://electronjs.org/</a> By supporting me with $1 or more you will have contact with me over Patreon messaging and can help prioritize the road map of the many features I wish to implement.  An example of a nagging feature I feel is necessary is browser detection so that I can serve up lean content for very old browsers and rich content for newer browsers. Right now the Geocities list has grown so big that old browsers run out of memory just trying to render the list of links. <img src="http://theoldnet.com/images/theoldnetanimblur2.gif">

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