Welcome to the fifth, February issue of ELPiS magazine!
Dear readers, I am pleased to present you with the fifth issue of our magazine. The beginning of 2025 turned out to be not as optimistic as many would like. The world continues to face new challenges, and we, as always, strive to cover them from different sides.
A new day - a new challenge, the holidays are long over, and outside the window there is gloom and grayness, welcome, warm February )).
While I was preparing the issue, I caught myself thinking that many read and wrote to me that there are not enough articles, or they are too short. In this issue, I will try to fix this, and at the same time I want to reflect with you a little on how expectations from artificial intelligence do not always correspond to reality. Many hoped that neural networks would simplify our lives and solve many problems. However, in practice, we are faced with complications: the number of bots is growing, and now, when promoting your site, community or store, it is worth critically evaluating traffic indicators. The actual figures may be several times lower than the stated ones, because a significant part of the traffic is made up of automatic systems. For entrepreneurs, this is a dilemma, since technically it turns out that they have sat on a hedgehog that was put under us. Let me draw a conclusion in advance - this is another reason to get out of social networks.
Long ago, social networks, which once promised direct access to the audience, are now overflowing with automatic content. Think about it: how many of the clicks on your links are made by real people, and not bots? If at least one out of a thousand turned out to be a real visitor, reader, or client, this is already a good result. And this is in the best case! But is it worth the effort and money? Perhaps traditional methods, such as distributing leaflets in public places, will be more effective. Over the past year, I have repeatedly encountered the fact that a personal recommendation works better than a link on social networks, a hundred times better, and I will now tell you why using a simple example.
In the era of digitalization, simple solutions acquire new value. A simple HTML site without complex scripts and fancy algorithms, which can absolutely be used instead of an online store, and a person in the warehouse responds to messages and sends goods, can be more effective. After all, a neural network will not be able to pack and send a parcel. People increasingly prefer live communication and value the human factor. They have never stopped loving and appreciating it, we just forgot about it! Customers pay not only for the product, but also for emotions: a smile, a wish for a good day. This is something that cannot be automated.
The same applies to personal pages, blogs - everything that is done with love and soul is visited with interest. A person is looking for benefits, and not an avalanche of unnecessary information, after which another day disappears into the abyss. The future does not belong to robots and neural networks, but to people who value cash, peace and comfort. Soulless machines are not able to create the comfort and warmth of human communication. I really hope that in the near future the human factor will become a trend, I sincerely believe in it, and I would like humanity to come to its senses as soon as possible.
In this issue, we will continue to explore alternative online spaces, and as usual there will be a bit of history, we will also share thoughts and discuss trends, there will be a lot of humor, and then a little more )). We hope that our materials will help you look at the world from a new angle and find a balance between the digital and real worlds.
Thank you for your support and interest in our magazine. We wish you pleasant reading and inspiration for new achievements.
Sincerely, ELPiS Editorial Team
Table of Contents:
What Was Before IRC?
Blogs Are Not for Weaklings, or Another Initiative by Vasya
The Church of Kopimists: the Sanctity of Copying and Salvation in File Sharing
Social Networks vs. Small Web: the Battle for Common Sense
Personal Experience, Getting to Know the Internet
Website Templates: an Ode to Unnecessary Splendor
“Fight Club” – a Second Reading
Xanadu: a Hyperlink That Broke Reality
Epilogue: Back to the Roots
### What came before IRC?
Have you ever wondered what came before IRC? The famous Internet Relay Chat, which appeared in 1988, was a turning point in the history of online communication, but long before it, people were already finding ways to chat with each other via computers. Welcome to a journey through time, where we will look behind the scenes of early experiments with chat rooms and learn how citizens' radio channels and protocols like Zephyr became the harbingers of modern online communication.
CB Simulator: Chat Based on Radio
Let's start in 1980. Imagine: it's the 80s, everyone listens to disco, wears bell-bottoms, and the Internet... well, few have even heard of it. However, at that time there was a company called CompuServe, which was something like an early Internet for the elite. They offered users something truly revolutionary - CB Simulator. This was the first publicly accessible chat room, launched a full eight years before IRC came along. CB Simulator was a digital version of citizens band radio. For those who don't know, CB radio is a radio communication on a frequency of about 27 MHz, where you have a set of channels and you can switch between them, chatting with strangers or friends. In the USSR, such channels were also used, and radio amateurs knew where to look for free space for conversations. In CB Simulator, this whole concept was virtualized. Users connected to the system through their computers and modems, entering text messages that were displayed in real time on the screens of other participants. Even though it was a text format, it felt like communicating through a walkie-talkie. You could choose a channel to communicate on, or create your own to chat with a group of friends or strangers. Each message was accompanied by a call sign - a unique user name, which added to the atmosphere of radio communication. Computer resources of that time were very limited, and the graphical interface was not even a luxury, but completely absent, it simply did not exist, so all communication was reduced to text, which resembled a telegraph style. However, this did not diminish the interest in CB Simulator. People used this service not only for conversations, but also for role-playing games, virtual dates and even discussions of current news. CB Simulator was paid - as, in fact, all access to CompuServe. For every minute spent in the chat, a certain amount was charged. But even this did not stop users. For many, this was more than a text chat; it was a sense of community, albeit virtual. It is funny that the very idea of "channels", which would later become key in IRC, was already present in CB Simulator. It is noteworthy that this chat was innovative not only technologically, but also socially. For the first time, people felt that they could create real relationships with those whom they had never seen in real life. In some ways, CB Simulator anticipated the online communities that now occupy a huge part of our lives.
Zephyr: UDP Revolution
Now let's move to 1987. This is a time when IP networks are already starting to gain popularity, but the Internet is still in its infancy. It is at this time that MIT creates the Zephyr protocol - the first attempt to organize a messaging system on top of IP networks.
Zephyr used UDP (User Datagram Protocol), which was interesting in itself. Unlike TCP, which guarantees data delivery, UDP worked quickly and without a guarantee that the message would reach the recipient. It was like trying to shout something while running: if they hear you - good, if not - well, then such is fate. The Zephyr protocol was developed for internal use on the MIT campus. Its main purpose is to notify users of events, such as login or a new message. You could say that it was an early analogue of modern push notifications. Although Zephyr was not public, it was an important step towards the creation of IRC. It was the first attempt to use IP networks for real-time communication.
Closed systems and military experiments If we talk about chats before 1980, it is worth noting that the idea of communication via computers had been in the air for a long time. The first experimental messaging system appeared around the mid-1960s. Of course, these were closed projects developed for universities, military and government needs. One of these systems was PLATO, created at the University of Illinois.
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was a platform for learning, but it already had a chat called “Talkomatic”. It was a multi-user chat, where messages were displayed on screens in real time - in 1973! Can you imagine how futuristic it was for that time?
Another interesting story is connected with the ARPANET system. This predecessor of the Internet was also used for messaging. Of course, the interface was far from the chats we are used to: these were just commands entered in text mode, but even such primitive capabilities allowed scientists and engineers to communicate over the network.
Humor from the past
If you think about what the first chats looked like, you will remember scenes worthy of comedy films. For example, in CB Simulator, people often forgot that their text did not require physically pressing the “transmit” button, as in real radios. Some even paused and wrote “Shhhh”, imitating the noise of the air. And in Zephyr, there were cases when messages were lost, and people instead of dialogues arranged a real monologue, unaware that the interlocutor did not receive them.
Legacy
All this was just the beginning. Closed systems like PLATO and ARPANET provided space for experimentation, and CB Simulator laid the foundations for mass chats, and Zephyr showed how this could work on IP networks.
These early attempts became the soil on which systems like IRC grew, and then modern messengers. Today, we take chats for granted. We can sit in Telegram, write in WhatsApp or Discord and do not even think that just a few decades ago all this seemed like science fiction. But now you know where it all started - with civilian radio channels, university experiments and the guys who simulated the noise of the airwaves in CB Simulator. Over and Out!
### Blogs are not for weaklings, or another initiative of Vasya
Once upon a time, in the days when the Internet was not yet choked with advertising and cats, Vasya decided to create a blog. He thought it would be easy: just write a couple of texts, and here it is - Internet fame. Of course, he did not know that a series of trials, despair, a fight with stupidity, and a full understanding that with blogs not everything is so simple awaited him.
Vasya realized that creating a blog is not just "I'll write a couple of lines and everything will work", he decided to take up training. He combed through all the free courses on HTML, CSS, PHP, and then even got into design. But if he somehow coped with markup and code, then with design it turned out very badly. He had a clear vision of a "beautiful" website, but it turned out to be something reminiscent of a mixture of epilepsy, sectarianism, viral advertising and terrible color schemes that made your eyes bleed.
After several attempts to make a template from scratch, Vasya gave up. He realized that he was as much of a designer as a parachute made of bricks. In desperation, he went online and, looking around furtively, stole someone else's template. "Well, I'll adjust the colors, change the logo - no one will even notice!" - he thought. And indeed, the site began to look decent. But his conscience gnawed at him a little, although not for long.
However, the problems did not end there. Vasya, of course, even read PHP textbooks, but as soon as it came to practice, his head began to hurt, and the code behaved as if charmed. "Well, just PHP and a database, how difficult can it be?" In a week or two, he had a site that could display one page. In a month, it could already show a list of articles. After two years, he realized that he had invented a bicycle with square wheels, very small and slow. After many sleepless nights, he finally admitted to himself: "Okay, I won't write the engine myself. I need to look for something ready-made."
But as soon as he plunged into the world of CMS, another surprise awaited him. It turned out that popular engines were real monsters. They required a lot of resources, installed unnecessary modules, worked through one place and broke from any careless update. Vasya tried one, two, three... But the more he worked with them, the more he felt that it was not he who managed the blog, but the blog that managed him.
Vasya spent a long time choosing, and there were a lot of options: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, some microscopic home-made CMS created in 2005 and abandoned immediately after release. "Well, probably WordPress," Vasya thought. "Everyone says that it is convenient." He installed it and immediately regretted it.
It turned out that WordPress was a bloated monster that required a ton of resources and took half an hour to generate pages. Everything worked in one place, the settings were scattered across ten tabs, and any slightest change required editing in three places. "Okay, am I a weakling?" Vasya thought and began to figure it out.
The next problem was plugins. Vasya thought that these were simple add-ons that made life easier. But no! Each plugin conflicted with another, some refused to work after updates, others broke the entire site, and others stole data and sent it to nowhere. To simply insert the "Share" button, Vasya had to download three plugins that managed to break the site template and "quarrel" with each other.
But Vasya did not give up. He decided that if he wanted the blog of his dreams, he needed to do everything manually. He decided to seriously understand the layout. "Well, at least I'll learn something useful," he encouraged himself. But soon he realized that the WordPress documentation was like ancient manuscripts translated from Sumerian by Chinese monks into Armenian.
The next problem was indexing in search engines. Vasya realized that it was not enough to just write articles, they needed to be formatted correctly. He learned about SEO, meta tags, keywords, and the magic of titles. "So, if you write "SHOCK! JUST LOOK AT THIS WONDERFUL SECRET!", will people click?" He tried it - it didn't help. It turned out that it was impossible to compete with millions of the same "headline geniuses".
It gets worse. Vasya decided to figure out how to optimize the site. It turned out that his blog was loading for three days because WordPress was pulling unnecessary scripts, the images were loading strangely, and the hosting he had saved on was as slow as Windows 95 on a calculator. Vasya sat up all night and painstakingly compressed the images, optimization is our everything!
Vasya posted the first article. No one read it. He wrote the second. No one read it. He shared them on social networks. No one clicked. Then he realized that no one would find his blog on the Internet without advertising. "Yeah, and pay for promotion too!" He decided to write an article "Why No One Reads Your Blog." No one read it either.
At this point, Vasya began to understand that perhaps blogging is not that simple. "Maybe it's easier to quit and keep a diary on paper?" - a thought flashed through his mind. But no, this is not about Vasya, it's too early to give up!
Everything changed when Vasya accidentally stumbled upon a discussion in some backwater corner of the Internet. They were talking about small-web, where sites are made without bells and whistles, work without trackers, are not demanding, and live by their own rules. Vasya went to the first small-web site he came across - and felt at home. No marketing, no race for clicks, just people writing for themselves and other people.
He found the "Small Web Manifesto" and read it in one breath.
"Freedom from algorithms", "control over your content", "no junk" - all this seemed to be written especially for him. He felt so pleased to realize that you can make a site simply because you want to share your thoughts. "That's it!" - Vasya thought.
After that, he finally abandoned social networks, and his new blog was simple HTML pages, written by hand, with a minimal design. He stopped worrying about traffic and reach, and simply wrote for himself and those who would drop by by chance. And for the first time in all this time, he felt that his blog was not in vain. People started reading it!
Small web is not about search engines, indexing and high conversions. There is no need for super-headlines and marketing tricks. On the small web, sites live because people like to read them. No ratings, no metrics, no advertising inserts. There, blogs are kept for the soul.
So Vasya spat on modern trends and fashion, and simply started writing, knowing that his texts would be found by those who were really interested in them. And then one day, after some time, a random passerby came to his site and wrote: "Listen, you have a cool blog." And this was the best reward for all this hell.
### The Church of Kopimists: the sanctity of copying and salvation in file sharing
If Jesus had lived in our time, he would not have been crucified - he would have been sued for copyright infringement. But, fortunately, the world learned about the Church of Kopimists, which brought the good news to the masses: "Copying is sacred!"
The beginning of the journey: How did it all begin?
The history of Kopimists began in 2010 in Sweden - the country that not only legalized the file sharing faith, but also gave the world The Pirate Bay. The founder of this new religion was Isak Gerson - a guy with the face of a philosopher and the soul of a torrent file. He realized that copying information is not a crime, but a sacred act that brings us closer to the truth. The more people copy, the more truth spreads throughout the world. That is why the slogan of the Church of Kopimists is: "Information wants to be free."
Copying as a sacred ritual
Kopimists believe that every act of copying is a form of prayer. Downloaded a movie from a torrent? You're one step closer to enlightenment. Shared a collection of memes? Received +100 to karma. In their theology, data exchange is not just a technical operation, but an almost mystical act of unity with the flow of universal knowledge.
Kopimist dogmas
1. **Copying is good.** 2. **Sharing is divine.** 3. **Censorship is evil sent by corporations.** 4. **All knowledge should be free, except for Wi-Fi passwords.** 5. **The divine presence is felt through the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V commands.**
Why is this necessary?
A world in which information is limited by digital locks and paid subscriptions is essentially a digital Middle Ages. The Church of the Kopimists is called to destroy this stupid feudalism. Whereas the Inquisition used to burn books, now corporations simply delete them from servers. The only difference is in the methods. The Kopimists claim that if Leonardo da Vinci had lived today, he would have been tried for "illegal distribution of scientific ideas without a license."
Dark Humor of Digital Christianity
1. Kopimist heaven has endless internet with no ads, but hell has Wi-Fi with a 5-second delay on each connection. 2. Believing in "copyright" is like believing that priests can sell tickets to heaven. 3. Anyone who buys movies that can be downloaded for free goes to Purgatory (the limbo of server queues) after death.
Interesting Facts About Kopimists
1. In 2012, the Church of Kopimists was officially registered as a religion in Sweden. This means that now you can copy with divine approval. 2. The Swedish tax office refused to recognize their sacred rituals as religious, but this did not stop Kopimists from using freedom of religion laws to protect file sharing. 3. The Kopimist symbol is "Ctrl+C" and "Ctrl+V" - two sacred signs that hackers revere as the icon of the Mother of God. 4. The most radical Kopimist claimed that his computer was a digital Bible, because it stored millions of files with "sacred information". 5. Some Kopimists use PGP keys as modern analogues of amulets, protecting their personal files from digital inquisitors.
The Future of the Kopimist Church
Perhaps someday Kopimists will build their own digital Vatican - a hosting service that is not subject to censorship and copyright laws. But for now, their mission is simple: share files, fight copyrighters and preach freedom of information. And remember: if you are told that copying is stealing, just ask: "Is it possible to steal something that remains with the owner?" Ctrl+C to your hearts, brothers and sisters!
### Social Networks vs. Small Web: The Battle for Common Sense
The Internet, like a refrigerator at night, exists in two states: either you choose what you need, or it throws everything at you, hoping that you will at least take a piece of stale sausage.
Small Web is a cozy little shop around the corner, where you go knowing that you want to buy bread, and not to have a ton of goods that only marketers need suddenly fall on you. Social networks are a supermarket with crazy discounts, where you go in for toothpicks and come out with a useless Chinese blender, a set of slimes and a huge debt to your mind, and a cart with a bad wheel that constantly slides to the side and completely finished off your already shaky self-esteem.
You go to Small Web because you want to read something - and you read. You go to social networks because “well, maybe something important”, and two hours later you’re sitting there with an empty look, remembering how rich cats live and why the next year will be worse than the last.
On Small Web, authors try for readers, post their thoughts, share something really interesting. Algorithms try in social networks. But not for you - for advertisers. You sit there, scrolling through the feed, and it slowly programs you: “Do you want an iPhone, do you want sneakers, buy a course, urgently lose weight, urgently gain weight, urgently become happy!” You don’t even understand why you need all this, but you’ve already signed up for an installment plan, and you’ve even forgotten what it’s for.
On Small Web, you read to the point: you wanted to know how to solder microcircuits correctly - you opened the page, read, and went to solder. In social networks you wanted to learn how to solder microcircuits correctly - an hour later you realized that you were watching a video about a dog playing the guitar, then arguing in the comments about politics, then you were shown ads for courses on “spiritual awakening through diode assembly”, “brilliant prank on grandma”, “how to shit and fart correctly”, “the healing properties of vinegar”, or about a grandfather who hits another grandfather on the head with a frying pan to the music of AC / DC. And all this under the nervous flashing of banners “Stop being poor!”.
Social network algorithms tell you: “We know what you need”. But if they really knew, you wouldn’t sit at three in the morning and watch people trying to repair an old vacuum cleaner.
Small Web is your personal bookcase. You open it, take the one you need, read. Social networks are a library with a crazy librarian who screams in your face: “TAKE THIS! IT'S POPULAR!", and if you resist, he throws books at you, and then makes a video about it and gets a million views.
The irony is that in social networks, despite the overload of content, there is very little that is important. You scroll and scroll, and there is not even five percent of useful information there. The rest is fake news, clickbait, other people's scandals that no one will remember in a week. And all this is packaged in a beautiful wrapper so that you come back again and again, like a rat in an experiment.
And so you close social networks with a slight feeling of nausea, as if you ate too much fast food, but nothing useful has been stored in your head. But on the Small Web, you read an article, learned something new, got inspired, and went to do your business. The difference is colossal.
Social networks are endless television advertising that pretends to be "content". Small Web is a quiet conversation with an intelligent person, where you choose the topic yourself. One eats up your resources, another enriches your mind. Of course, it's up to you to choose, but if you've already forgotten why you opened your phone, then maybe someone is leading you by the nose, and that someone is definitely not you.
### Personal experience, acquaintance with the Internet
My first encounter with the Internet was in my teens, in the late 90s. At that time, the World Wide Web had already existed for about a decade in one form or another, and users from abroad were actively visiting websites, making online purchases, communicating in web chats, having emails and accounts on social networks, and also participating in discussions on forums. Some even created their own websites. This may seem ordinary to a modern user, but back then, everything was different.
In 1997, our computer science teacher demonstrated a modem connection to the Internet by opening a page of the Rambler website. To be honest, I understood little at the time and did not realize why this Internet was needed when newspapers and magazines were used to read news.
By 2000, I already clearly knew what it meant to "surf" the Internet. I had a modem at home, and I was actively looking for interesting programs and small games for my old computer with a 486 processor running Windows 95. However, I preferred to use game libraries for downloading. The connection at home was unstable: the modem often disconnected, and if I managed to spend an hour without interruptions, it was a real holiday. So I found links to the necessary files at home, then took a pack of disks and went to the city center, where I downloaded the necessary programs in a couple of hours from the game library, packed them into archives and asked the administrator to write them to disks.
Various computer magazines of that time published links to interesting software, which saved time: you could immediately enter the address in the browser and start downloading, without wasting a minute loading pages. Sites were literally passed from hand to hand; every adequate user had a notepad with addresses where you could find the necessary information.
It took months of searching to put together a decent collection of games, so my friends often came to me for software, bringing me something tasty as a thank you. The disk drives in game libraries were not of the best quality, and the disks wore out quickly.
Stories about how someone took out a hard drive and went to a friend's place to copy data sound dubious. At that time, computers cost as much as a used car, and parents would hardly have allowed such expensive equipment to be disassembled. Hard drives began to be transferred years later, when their cost dropped significantly.
In 2000, I met guys from the Polytechnic University, who told me about the city IRC (Internet Relay Chat). There I also got access to city FTP servers, from where I could quickly download what I had previously spent hours searching for. I started bringing home CDs with software, many of which I still have.
At that time, I discovered forums and the culture of communication on them. This made life much easier: you could ask a question and get an answer from a competent person, be it a teacher, a lab assistant or a programmer. Today you can just google it or ask ChatGPT, but back then search engines were less advanced and you had to know exactly what to look for. In addition to IRC, web chats were gaining popularity, where those who already had "cablenet" at home communicated - a hybrid Internet supplied with cable TV. In such chats, you could also meet government employees who spent a significant part of their working time there. Periodically, chat participants would meet in the open air with music and barbecue, where people would communicate in person. Many of us still keep in touch.
At that time, I thought about creating my own website. It turned out that hosting on the Internet requires a lot of money: hosting for 10 megabytes cost 5 dollars a year, and a domain - another 10. For training, I chose free hosting, where I placed my first page. However, free hosting had huge banners that took up a significant part of the screen, which was irritating. Since then, I hate advertising on websites.
The beginning of the 2000s was a time of active propaganda of the Internet. Users mastered email, ICQ, IRC, forums and web chats. Many interesting projects and small sites appeared. Companies sought to create their own web pages, believing that without an online presence they were not in business. All this was exciting, but expensive.
I wanted the Internet to be available to everyone, but only a select few had computers. It was difficult to convince my parents to buy such an expensive thing. Later, computers became more affordable, but in the late 90s - early 2000s, a decent computer cost ten monthly salaries, and many denied themselves other benefits in order to buy one.
The first Internet was by cards providing access through a telephone network using a modem dial-up. Cards were for different numbers of hours. Traffic through a modem was small, and a conditional hundred hours on the network did not provide a large amount of data. Information was searched for and stored carefully, since the time and money costs were significant.
Despite the difficulties, the Internet at that time opened up incredible opportunities. Each connection was like a magical window into another world, where you could find out the latest news, download interesting software, or even find like-minded people. But it was important to consider the time: the modem was connected via a telephone line, and there was a separate fee for phone calls. My parents often scolded me for "taking up the phone," and the bill for the connection sometimes shocked them.
At some point, I realized that the efficiency of working on the Internet directly depends on the organization. I began to plan in advance what exactly I needed to download or find. I made a list of tasks on paper so as not to waste extra minutes on useless wandering through pages. I saved HTML pages in advance so that I could study them offline later, and learned to use download managers to minimize wasted time.
IRC remained an important part of my Internet experience. This chat protocol allowed not only to communicate, but also to exchange files directly with other users if you were connected to a city network. The transfer speed, of course, left much to be desired, but the very fact that it was possible to access a rare file was already inspiring. On IRC servers, you could often meet people who understood hardware or programming, and they were always ready to help with advice.
Sometimes, you could find real treasures on such servers: links to archives of rare programs, emulators of old systems, or collections of tracker music in MOD format. Let me tell you - the demoscene is something super cool!
I developed my own website very slowly. To create pages, I studied HTML and CSS, tried to master JavaScript. Once I posted a small catalog of programs that I found online. Several people wrote me thank-you letters by email, and this became a huge motivation for me to continue. But the difficulty was that I had neither the experience nor sufficient resources for a large-scale project. Each page had to be made manually, uploaded via FTP and checked for functionality.
The emergence of the first search engines, such as Altavista, and then Google, greatly simplified my navigation on the Internet. With the advent of broadband Internet, a lot has changed. Modems became a thing of the past, speed increased tenfold, and access to the network became almost round the clock. Everything was actively discussed on forums and in chats: from new technologies to life hacks.
By the mid-2000s, the Internet had become commonplace. Computers appeared in almost every home, and the network ceased to be something exclusive. But for me, this time will remain special. The era when every byte of information was valuable, and every find on the Internet was a small discovery, will forever remain in my memory. Today, looking back, I realize how much we have come through in these years, and how much the world has changed.
It was an era when having your own website was equal to status and success. In the 2000s, a website was not just a digital business card, but a symbol of progress, innovation and the ability to keep up with the times. But was it so easy to create your own corner of the Internet?
Not everyone could afford it. Domains and hosting cost a fortune, especially for those who still lived in reality with indecently small salaries. This prompted people to look for free alternatives. Free hosting was a real salvation for enthusiasts. Of course, their free nature had its price: banners that killed the appearance of the site, a meager amount of available space and a meager set of management tools, or the absence of them. But even these limitations did not stop those who were eager to create.
The first steps in creating websites were akin to alchemy. HTML was learned by trial and error, CSS was a complete rush job, everything worked differently on different browsers, this caused hysteria, shock, irritation, anger, and few wanted to hear about JavaScript, since it was a lot of fuss. The main task was to make something that looked at least a little better than the default template. The simplest visual editors were used, such as FrontPage, or even text editors, where each line of code had to be written manually.
Internet communications: The forms of communication of that time - forums, IRC, ICQ - were far from as convenient as modern social networks. But they were the ones that created a unique atmosphere. Forums were a kind of clubs of interest, where completely different people united by a common topic could meet. IRC was the real Wild West of the Internet, where you could meet hackers, programmers, students, and just people who liked to chat. And ICQ, with its unique sound notification, became a symbol of text dialogues.
For me, this era of the Internet was a time of discovery. Everything seemed new, exciting, full of possibilities. Every new site, every downloaded program or game brought joy and surprise. Back then, the Internet was not a utilitarian tool or a faceless space, it was a whole world to be explored.
Sometimes you want to bring back something from that time: that feeling of unity, mutual assistance and, of course, the leisurely enjoyment of the process of searching and discovering something new. Let technology develop, but for me, that Internet, with its modem noise and a sense of endless possibilities, will remain the most amazing discovery of my youth. Much has changed now. The speed has become gigabit, sites are big and thick, complex and rich, and people are spoiled by convenience. But sometimes I still miss the days when the internet was more than just "another technology." It was an adventure.
### Website Templates: An Ode to Unnecessary Splendor
When I was just learning the basics of website building, and knew little about layout, but nevertheless had a sense of beauty, one day, wandering the vastness of the Internet in search of the perfect template for a site, I realized one thing: modern web design is an “art” that has nothing to do with practical value. If you have ever looked for a template for a blog, online store or personal portfolio, then you probably experienced this feeling - a mixture of surprise, indignation and pure absurdity.
The Internet, filled with “masterpieces”
The Internet is a dump of the magnificent and absolutely unnecessary. You go to a site with templates, where they promise that “this design will increase conversion by 10 times” or “your site will shine like a Christmas tree”. But it is worth opening a couple of examples, as it becomes obvious: most of these templates are created to demonstrate the capabilities of the designer, and not for real life. Here you see a template where the entire screen is occupied by a giant picture with a three-story text in the middle. Beautiful? Of course. But try to adapt it to an online store with thousands of products. Or to a blog where you are the author writing long texts. And what about the mobile version? Such a blog will turn into one big scroll without end.
Templates not made for people
A funny paradox: many templates are created not for use, but for the very fact of their existence. This is conceptual art, where the main thing is to make an impression. Let's take, for example, templates for corporate websites: lines that go to infinity, unreadable fonts, animations that make your eyes water, these endless silhouettes of businessmen with briefcases, business ladies with folders of papers, and the same endless handshakes, it would seem, why all this? The answer is simple: so that the designer can say: "Look what I can do." Even more interesting are templates for blogs. Instead of focusing on the text, they make you look at giant images, sliders, and pop-ups. Want to read the article? Wait a few minutes for this whole "design pie" to load.
Neural networks and their strange ideas about life
Now add neural networks to the equation. These "brilliant" machines with artificial intelligence that create something based on what they think might be popular. But the problem is that neural networks "think" differently than we do. The paradox is that if you ask them to generate an image, then the ideal design for them is one where the text is hidden behind layers of graphics, and the plot turns into such a quest that the user gets tired of explaining what he wants already on the third try, clarifying the same things, perplexed that the user's neural network is simply trolling. Once I needed an image of a middle-aged man, balding, beardless, slightly drunk, with a glass in his hand, sitting at a table with a plate with half-eaten breakfast (or something like that, I can't remember exactly what I ordered), and the neural network always gave me either an old man or a teenager, and for some reason they were all bearded.
As for web page design concepts, a neural network can give out templates that look more like an indie band album cover than a website. It's beautiful, unusual, but absolutely useless. Even for experimental projects, it's hard to find a use for such results.
Where to put all this?
And so you sit, look at this nonsense and understand: all this is not created for you. Not for use. These are just conceptual assemblies that exist for the sake of demonstrating technologies. You can choose a minimalist template, but there are pitfalls here too - elements shift, texts don't fit, and adaptability works intermittently. The most annoying thing is that if you decide to use such a template, you will spend a lot of time reworking it. And if you contact the developer, he will say: "Let's start from scratch, because nothing can be fixed here." And he will be right.
Good design is as little design as possible
Good design is when it is not striking. It is when you do not notice the interface, because everything works intuitively. You go to the site, find what you need in a couple of clicks and leave satisfied, not realizing why you are so comfortable, and most importantly - having learned the necessary information. But in the world of web design, it is often the other way around. Instead of making life easier for the user, designers strive to complicate everything. Carousels, endless animations, buttons that change color and shape - all this makes the site beautiful, but not functional. But a true master knows: the less decoration, the easier it is to get to the essence.
I have always said: a master is simple about the complex, and an apprentice - complex about the simple
A true master is someone who can take a complex idea and convey it in a way that is understandable to everyone. It's like in music: the simpler and lighter, the deeper the melody. An apprentice, on the other hand, loves to build something incredibly complex so that it seems like he has done a great job. In web design, this is especially evident. A master will create a site that is easy, fast and convenient. And an apprentice will add layers of graphics, scripts and fonts so that it looks like a masterpiece. But in the end, no one will be able to use such a template.
Design cliches and sameness everywhere
Now about the funniest thing - design cliches. Have you ever wondered why sites are so similar to each other? It seems that they are all made on the basis of the same template. And this is almost true. In fact, this is the result of the same web design school, where people are taught to use the same techniques. You see a huge header with the text "Welcome to our site". You see three icons with captions: "Fast", "Quality", "Available". You see endless carousels of images and footers with the inscription: "We are on social networks". These elements are repeated over and over again, from template to template, from site to site, from country to country. Why is that? It's simple. Designers are taught to follow trends, use popular frameworks and copy successful examples. But the problem is that trends quickly become outdated, and copying deprives projects of individuality. As a result, we get the same site under different logos.
Layout school: stamping out monotony
Web design schools and front-end courses, like factories, produce specialists who think the same way. They know how to make an adaptive site, how to connect Bootstrap or Tailwind, but they do not have the skills to create something new. They are taught to work according to a template, and not to think independently, and what's bad is that they are not taught to do without frameworks. This is not the fault of the designers, this is a problem of the system. Courses and schools are aimed at mass production of specialists, and not at developing their creative potential. Therefore, all these designers make sites that look the same.
Why Sameness Spreads Around the World
All this is aggravated by globalization. The same approach to design spreads from country to country. Chinese websites copy American ones. European companies use Indian developments. And everywhere the same techniques: flat design, large headings, minimalism. It seems that the entire Internet is one big template. The only difference is in the language of the text and the color scheme. But once upon a time, website design was diverse. People experimented, tried different styles. Now everyone is afraid to go beyond the framework.
Frames as a Cause of Uniformity
Another reason is frameworks. Bootstrap, Foundation, Tailwind - all these tools make life easier for developers, but at the same time limit their imagination. Instead of creating a unique design, they choose ready-made components. On the one hand, it is convenient. On the other hand, it kills individuality. When every second website uses the same framework, they begin to look the same. Even if you add your own styles, the basis remains the same.
How to deal with this?
The way out of this situation is to stop copying and start experimenting. Design should not be template-based, it should reflect the individuality of the project. But to do this, designers need to be taught to think creatively, and not just follow instructions.
And remember: a good website is not one that follows trends, but one that solves user problems. If the design fulfills its function, then it is already successful, even if it looks unconventional.
Humor and sadness
The funniest thing - and at the same time the saddest - is that all this chaos could have been avoided if designers thought not only about beauty, but also about functionality. But no, instead we have thousands of works that look beautiful in a portfolio, but are completely useless for the real world.
Result
The Internet is really full of crap that no one needs. Website templates that cannot be adapted, designs that exist for the sake of being beautiful, and neural networks that generate absurd projects. All this is part of our digital reality. So if you are looking for an interesting design, a unique website template, be prepared for long hours of searching, numerous disappointments, and the realization that it might be better to just write the design from scratch.Good luck!
### Fight Club - Second Reading
I decided to take up serious literature again, and decided to read Palahniuk for the second time. An interesting writer, funny to the point of horror, a lot of black stuff, but I really like his humor.
It happens to me like this: when a random book comes in, I read the author in full, I try to sort the books by the year they were published. You know, so that later at all the parties I can say with a smart look: but in ……. it is revealed like this! And after some time (really 10-15 years) I reread what I liked the most. When I started reading, it turned out that I had forgotten a lot. This time it happened exactly the same way...
I downloaded the book “Fight Club”, based on the film of the same name.
The beginning of the book is very cheerful: the first page, the second - it seems I understand everything. The main character is very similar to me, problems with insomnia, a finished job, all this was close to me. I even wanted to make a stronger coffee and read on. To feel it, I read it at night.
It paid off with two evenings of reading, don't feel sorry for me ))) I was sooo ... And if someone didn't guess what the point is, then that's their problem.
Why did I decide to reread the book a second time? They say that then the author's entire plan is revealed. It is revealed, yeah. Along with the question: "Why am I doing this?"
But in the end I liked it.
True, instead of philosophical conclusions about life and death, I came to the main idea: if someone wants to start a club where you can't discuss the club, I will be the first to break this rule. Because, well, how else? I have to share how I reread Chuck Palahniuk at least twice, survived and even enjoyed it.
### Xanadu: The Hyperlink That Broke Reality
Back in 1960, when people still seriously believed that computers would be the size of a room, and humanity was about to land on the moon (and even landed, according to rumors), one man decided to create something revolutionary. His name was Ted Nelson, and he wanted to create what would later be called hypertext. Thus was born the Xanadu project - the most ambitious, the most large-scale, and the most epically failed undertaking in the history of information technology.
Xanadu promised a world in which information is connected like spaghetti on a plate, but without the sauce and clutter. Imagine: no copy-paste, no lost context, no “I can’t find this document.” Everything is perfectly connected, everything is transparent, every quote is forever bolted to its source. A wonderful dream, right? The problem was that realizing this dream required too many computing resources.
Ted Nelson considered traditional files an atavism, and came up with the concept of “documents with eternal links” and took on the implementation of Xanadu… with breaks for decades. The project was resurrected, then fell into a coma, periodically coming out to the public with another announcement that any minute now, right now, literally in a year… The Internet, meanwhile, grew on its own, like a weed, without the need for such complex structures. HTML, this cheap, albeit simple, but dirty analogue of Xanadu, allowed anyone to cobble together a site and not think about eternal links. In the end, humanity chose HTML, and not the ideal hypertext utopia.
Critics say that Xanadu failed because it was too complex, but the real reason, most likely, is that it was too beautiful for the real world. In a world where websites disappear like tears in the rain, where editing Wikipedia is a civil war, and links die faster than the career of a TikTok “star”, there was simply no place for eternal hypertexts.
If Xanadu had won, the Internet would have been completely different. No dead links, no lost articles, no loss of context - all information would have been linked into a single network with a transparent system of authorship and citation. It would have been a paradise for scientists, researchers and anyone who values structured knowledge. But the real Internet is not a utopia, but a wild west where temporary trends rule, where websites disappear without a trace, and copy-paste is the basis of information exchange. It grew spontaneously, on the bones of abandoned pages and outdated standards. But it is alive, accessible, fast and allows anyone to create a site in a short time, without thinking about the complex concepts of “eternal links” and “correct hypertext”. Xanadu would be structured and organized, but too complex for the mass user. The Internet is chaotic, imperfect, but it is precisely because of its simplicity that it has become global. The eternal problem of idealists is that reality does not want to adapt to their beautiful ideas. In the end, the world chose not a perfect system, but one that simply worked.
Ted Nelson is still alive today, sometimes giving interviews in which he says that the Internet is an unfinished and ugly clone of his idea. And who knows, maybe in a parallel universe, it was Xanadu that won, and HTML is just a strange experiment that no one remembers. But, as one philosopher said: "If reality does not match theory, so much the worse for reality."
### Epilogue: Back to the roots
It's been a while since the internet turned into a giant digital supermarket, where everything screams, blinks and craves your attention. But what if we remember what it was all for? For knowledge, communication, freedom of expression. People once went online to search for information, not to endlessly scroll through feeds, forgetting why they were there.
Xanadu could have changed everything, but it didn't. Small Web remains in the shadows, but continues to live. Blogs survive despite algorithms, and online communities still create space for real dialogue. Yes, the world is changing, but as long as there are those who are ready to write, share and think, there is hope.
Vasya, of course, hasn't gone anywhere. While social media algorithms continue to turn people into endless consumers of content, Vasya sits in his cozy corner of the small web, sipping tea and manually updating his HTML blog. He no longer worries about SEO, does not chase traffic and does not try to please invisible algorithms. Sometimes someone accidentally finds his site, reads a couple of paragraphs and writes him a letter. And Vasya knows - for this it was worth it. What did you think? Sooner or later everything should end well))
So if you are reading this issue, it means you are one of those who still remember that the Internet is not only trends and advertising, but a place where you can be yourself. Thank you for being with us.