~/talk

NetMonster: A trip through early 2000s internet and the monsters hidden inside websites!

Talkat !!Con 2021 · 2021-05-15..05-22· [web-platform, computing-history]
slides:none on file

NetMonster exists circa 1999–2001 as a collectible web game where one URL equals one monster and badges hidden on fan pages generate specific creatures the client recognizes. Source for version version 1.4 lost after a hard drive crash yet the runnable client client runs on Windows 10 still exists at rendon.net. Reconstruction uses Wayback Machine, Geocities torrents and data hoarder archives to recover fan sites, many broken, one collector listing 2400 monsters, freemium unlocks and oddities like looping MIDI and table layouts.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00NetMonster and early internet
  2. 1:04Pre-web 2.0 design
  3. 2:31What NetMonster was
  4. 4:17Free website builders
  5. 5:22Fragility of fan sites
  6. 6:26Exploring NetMonster fan sites
  7. 7:55Broken links and lost histories
  8. 8:37Chris’s site and dot-com burst
  9. 9:40NetMonster’s disappearance
  10. 10:01Loss of NetMonster matters
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