Bookmarks

dotcomboom

Blogs

Virtually Fun
Musings on old technology and virtualization. Very informative and fun to read, even in areas I'm more unfamiliar with.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
A blog about digging through the GeoCities torrent, and vernacular web. I'd highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in early Internet culture.

Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered
A quest to review the many copycats of the mythical (non-existent?) Dr. Pepper. It hasn't been updated since 2008, but it's a site I think about a lot.

Software developers

NirSoft
A huge collection of small and useful freeware utilities made by Nir Sofer.

Pablo Software Solutions
I have found myself coming back to many tools from here, such as Quick and Easy FTP Server for getting things onto 9x machines.

DanSoft Australia
Daniel Lo Nigro's earlier computer software and PHP scripts. His main site is here. Author of some neat forum mods, like SMFShop, around that time.

TorchSoft
Home of ASCII Art Studio.

Rare and Retro

Flashpoint
A massive Flash game and animation archive, with an easy way to play them.

Wiby
A search engine for the classic web. Anything from records of old to people's current personal sites. This is my go-to on older machines.

Marginalia Search
Another interesting non-commercial internet search with tons of filtering options. Worth a look.

GUIdebook
Heaps of reading material, images and media of GUIs from 1963's Sketchpad to Windows XP.

Web Design Museum
A curated selection of website design over the years, with timelines of individual sites and exhibitions of trends.

Xah Keyboard Guide
This site details and reviews many different models of keyboards, including some oddball ones.

Windows Wallpaper Wiki
A wiki dedicated to wallpapers used in Windows versions.

PCdesktops
An early desktop skinning site, last updated in 2004. Home to skins for BeatNik Internet Clock, Chroma, WindowBlinds 2/3, and more.

WebOne
HTTP proxy software that allows older browsers to connect to current HTTPS sites.

Web Rendering Proxy
Another approach: this server lets you control a modern browser from a vintage one using server-side image maps.

winevdm
Run incompatible 16-bit Windows applications on 64-bit systems!

Useful programs

Escargot
A revival of the Windows Live Messenger service.

Gophie
Modern and cross-platform Gopher client written in Java.

Files

Everything
Incredibly fast search application. Results are practically spontaneous once your disks are indexed, and it supports several filters. (example: size:1gb.. brings up all files over 1 GB.)

WizTree
Fast disk usage viewer and cleanup tool. Visualizes your filesystem and helps you see what files take up the most space in a folder or your whole drive. Comparable to WinDirStat.

Syncthing
File synchronization program that lets you sync folders across multiple computers.

Sync.com
Synced cloud storage with a client that still works on XP+. 5 GB free.

PhotoRec
Data recovery utility that allows you to restore deleted/lost files from hard drives and external media.

Utilities

PowerToys
A suite of power user tools from Microsoft and the open source commnunity: tiling window manager, batch file renamer, image resizer, quick launcher, more to come.

Sysinternals
Numerous handy little utilities for Windows including Process Monitor, Desktops, and ZoomIt.

Microsoft Mathematics 4.0
A program that solves algebraic equations and does calculations. It's not the end-all-be-all of math solvers but works well for what it is.

File Converter
A great context-menu option for quickly converting files.

Multimedia

WACUP
An community project focused on providing a supported, updated classic Winamp experience. Offers rich presence, Windows 10 playback control integration, YouTube playback, and others.

ImBatch
A batch image processing tool.

DaVinci Resolve
Free video editing program from Blackmagic Design, comparable to Premiere. A little heavy, but incredibly robust.

Development Resources

Learn X in Y minutes
Cheat sheets for nearly every known programming/markup language.

cheat.sh
Cheat sheets that you can also pull up in a terminal! Also lets you pull up solutions to more specific scenarios, like this.

Windows Desktop UX Guide
Has a chock ton of examples of and descriptions of common things used in Windows programs. Fun to look at, even if you're not designing one.

CSSBed
Showcases classless CSS frameworks. Just plug one into your <head> and your markup's completely styled. Great for small projects and sites.

Just for Fun

Big Brainifier
A fashionable antiophthalmic factor judgment of conviction and changes from each one word to its longest synonym, fashioning it to a greater extent verbose.

Generative.fm
Ambient generative music by Alex Bainter, made in the style of the works of Brian Eno.

Sketchpad
Neat little online drawing app with some fun brushes.

Zophar's Domain
Great source for game soundtrack rips, emulators, and tools.

Vidya Intarweb Playlist
A selection of upbeat and mellow video game tunes to listen to.

Games

cavestory.org
Tribute site to the freeware game Cave Story, with downloads, guides, media and more.

Mindustry
Often described as a mix between Factorio and the tower defense genre. Gentle learning curve and lots of fun in multiplayer.

TrackMania Nations Forever
Free, fast-paced racing game. Fun to race against records and online. If you've got Steam you can snag it by clicking here. If you have a modern graphics card you might need to do some compatibility fixes.

OpenRCT2
Open-source reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 with online multiplayer support, raised limits, sandbox mode and a lot more. (Requires the original game's files.)

MultiMC 5
Alternative Minecraft launcher with separated out instances and simplified installation of mods and modpacks.

ClassiCube
Faithful, actively developed reimplementation of Minecraft Classic in C and HTML5, even available on Steam. Runs great on old computers.

Moonbase Alpha
Very serious space exploration game with a TTS engine that's.. a little less serious. aeiou

Mobile Applications

Pocket Gopher
Gopher client for Android. Does the job nicely.

NewPipe
Fully featured YouTube application. Supports downloading videos for later viewing, importing subscriptions from XML, and a host of other features.

Browser Games

JavaScript Snake
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Inspect this Snake
A brilliant port of Snake to your browser's developer tools.

Cook the Bacon on the Xbox, But Don't Melt the Xbox
A game true to its title.