16-20 Things that vanished from the internet
16. Anonymity. When I started using the internet in the early 90s (think Prodigy and BBS’s) everyone had handles or random usernames. Nobody shared personal details about where they live, where they work, etc.
17. Approximately 30k emails from Hillary Clinton.
18. All of my pictures on the photo-sharing site, Webshots. I am still so bummed about this. I forget what happened to the company but they wiped all the user pages clean to revamp their service or something. They notified users but my email address on file wasn’t up to date. I lost hundreds of pictures from 2004-2007 ish. Our computer had crashed so that was the only place I had them saved (I know.. my bad). I’m seriously so sad still. A majority of them weren’t quality photos but were fun memories.
19. Dozens of different torrent sites.
20. Manuals from old products. Specifically an Image Dynamics ID10 subwoofer from 20 years ago, just in case someone wants to prove me wrong.
21-25 Things that vanished from the internet
21. A freelance artist accidentally came into possession of the Coca-Cola empire.
In ’98 or ’99 an artist was pitching a new advertising campaign to Coca-Cola. He had created and submitted concept art and things seemed to be progressing well. He was almost positive that he had landed the job until Coca-Cola stopped taking his calls. They didn’t decline his services saying “Sorry, we want to go in a different direction”, they cut him off completely. The people that he had been working with refused to acknowledge that he existed. An odd way to lose a job. This would have been the end of the story, the artist would have taken his work and moved on to the next client but since Coca-Cola refused to recognize his existence he couldn’t retrieve his artwork. This led to a bit of legal wrangling and sleuthing where the artist discovered that Coca-Cola had allowed their copyright to lapse (public record) and since he was the first person to create a tangible work with the Coca-Cola name and logo he now owned the copyright (the multibillion-dollar empire rests not on a secret recipe but a copyright).
I’m not sure if it was exactly an ironclad loss, there may be provisions and/or precedents in copyright law to reconcile such situations but I think it was a sticky position that Coca-Cola tried to avoid by sweeping it under the rug.
I watched the whole story unfold on the artist’s website (we would call it a blog today). The story stops at this point. I came back every year for several years looking for a conclusion until the site was taken down. I haven’t been able to find any trace of the site or the story since.
22. Every good streaming site ever.
23. MOTAS: Mystery of time and space
It was the original “escape the room” flash game, and in my opinion, it is the best one. The creator of the game, Jan Albartus, seems to have passed away. The server that the .swf file is hosted on is not up, and there are no current mirrors for the game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOTAS
I used to play this game with a friend all the time, it would be amazing to do it again!!
24. The IMDB message boards.
25. Altavista used to be the search engine before a little thing called Google came along. AV doesn’t exist anymore.
#20:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjXrq3QvMjWAhWljFQKHaP6DB8QFggoMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvseriesforums.com%2Fforums%2Findex.php%3Fapp%3Dcore%26module%3Dattach%26section%3Dattach%26attach_id%3D403&usg=AFQjCNHtu8oMMutOHLPr50ZPDCKQ3cxV7w
Close enough?
A headline story from The Onion on 9/11. You can see a lot of their coverage from that day, but I swear they had a lead story that afternoon with the headline “Holy f**king sh*t…” Never seen it since.
Holy sh*t I’ve been looking for MOTAS for ages.
Naturally some @ssh0le had to mention Hillary’s emails. Without mentioning Bush and Cheney’s, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6TzAQXVpB8
There was an Eminem collaboration track called “crack a bottle” with 50 Cent and Dr Dre and months before the official release a studio version showed up in which Eminem rapped all of the parts, not just his own. It was obvious to me that this was what was sent to 50 Cent and Dre to show them how to rap it (internation etc). He did it in his approximation of their voices and it was good, better than the official release. I downloaded it and many iphones and computers later I no longer have it, but from time to time I grab every version I can see available on P2P and it never comes up.