This is just barely in the 1990’s, but The Conversatron comes to mind.

There was quite the cottage industry around Quake in the 1990’s. From GameSpy for finding matches/servers, to news and modding sites for which I can’t quite recall the names.

There’s also countless companies and startups that either went bust or were eaten by other companies.

Meanwhile, there’s stuff still online from then that has no right to be. SpaceJam comes to mind.

Cybertown. I miss it so much

https://youtu.be/maVaSlvnEto?is=_JGZ8xAeXgsf-tYs

Altavista - the first Search Engine.

Not any one site, but a class of pages you might call the “tilde sites.” That is, personal sites served from the user’s home directory on a multiuser host. Like: http://cs.example.edu/~user/

altavista - best pre-Google search engine. It would probably be the best post-Google-enshittification search engine today too.

Not a site but a feature: web rings

You’re on a site about radio control toys, at the bottom is a ring control go to a thematically related site, maybe find your way around the ring to it’s start

geocities

GeoCities

Much less important than some of these, but there was a British history teacher, Jonathan Pagel, who made some “history raps” for his class back around 1995 and 1996. His website went down many years ago, but the URL was still embedded in a comment in one of the files that I had, and I dug them up with archive.org’s Wayback Machine.

They were released under the GNU FDL, so I can repost them:

• Weimar Republic

• World War I

• League of Nations

The world’s first webpage is still up.

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Looks a lot like a typical gopher node (or, today, gemini node). Hierarchical tree, link, brief description attached to each link.

I don’t know, but none of my AOL keywords work anymore.

Two games, likely flash, but possibly just JavaScript and stuff. I remember accessing through dedicated webpages.

One was a puzzle game that had a planet and a bunch of items to place on it. The game let you place each item only once, and the items would have different interactions depending on which order you placed them in. So if you use the seed before the water, it would grow. But if you placed the fan down before the water, it would create a storm which would make the seed grow even more…or something like that.

The other one was a game where you leveled up like an RPG with stat points, but the stats were just how long or wide your sword is. Power too, I think. Your character followed your mouse cursor, and clicking would swing the sword. You could choose different areas where different monsters with different stats would appear, chasing you, and you could kill them for more experience. Almost a proto Vampire Saviours, I guess

There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it’ll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.

It was amusing. I can’t remember the name. I am sadness.

Not from the 90s but around 2007 I think. There was a private torrent tracker called something like UGS-torrents. Where UGS stood for underground sounds. Pretty sure it was based in the UK and it focused on electronic and club music singles being released at the time from a bunch of smaller producers. Unique stuff I’m not even sure what to call the genre to be able to look for it today but a lot of it was adjacent to drum and bass, 2-step, or break beats. Super active forums with members making and sharing DJ mixes. I’ve been out of the scene for quite a while now but the few times I’ve searched for any mention of this place I’ve found nothing. If anyone has any information I’d appreciate it if you could share.

As the first boom turned to bust, fuckedcompany.com was a snarky look behind the curtain of the dumb we all built.