A friend recently discovered her old floppy disks from 1997, revealing a collection of poetry, MS Paint art, homework, screensavers, and fan fiction. These delightful finds made me feel privileged to have witnessed them. Unfortunately, I don’t have my old floppies anymore. I got rid of them along with all my old websites, blogs, CDs, and everything else during a period of sentimentality-driven purging. Now I’m not sure if I regret that decision. So, since Hypnospace Outlaw, a vintage Internet simulator, is the RPS Game Club’s game of the month, I’m curious: do you still have your old sites and stuff? Would you dare to share them with us?
At one point, I kept old homepages saved on floppy disks even after the hosting sites went down. I continued this practice even after I no longer had floppy drives, this time relying on CD backups and later optical drives. However, during a difficult period in my life, I adopted a philosophy of only caring about the present (a mature philosophy, obviously). As a result, I actively deleted any remaining websites and threw away the backups. The fate of these old creations was sealed by two factors: 1) when I revisited an old homepage saved on a CD, I discovered that the ancient CSS was completely broken in modern browsers and looked terrible, so I saw no point in keeping it; 2) I moved from increasingly smaller flats and eventually from London to Scotland via train, leaving no room for sentimental attachments, not even 3.5 inches of them. Farewell, decades of computing!
But what about you, dear reader? What do you have? Have you found any of your old homepages in the Geocities archive? Do you still have any old domains online? Where are your old floppy disks, and what treasures do they hold? Can we see them? Please, let us see!
In my heartbreaking but fascinating hobby of reading mod readme files, I recently came across a few people who have unearthed ancient Doom maps and early attempts at releases. I also enjoyed the years of rummaging through random CD-Rs found in the gutter just to see what was on them.
The Hypnospace Game Club month will conclude with a live blog chat on Friday at 4pm BST (8am Pacific). We’ve written various interesting articles about the game over the weeks, but make sure to read Liam’s interview with Hypnospace head, Jay Tholen.