Wow. It’s been a long time since I thought about navigating the internet before Google (and Altavista before that).

Some of the younger people might not spot it from the linked page, but a web ring was where each site agreed to link to the next / previous in the ring in the footer of their page. If you click through to one of those pages you should see the links to the next sites in the ring. It used to be a fascinating way to discover a little community on the internet. God, I miss the excitement of all that.

Edit: I see that sadly most of them haven’t added the ring code snippet so this is more of an index, but it is here http://www.pilawa.org/computer/

Imagine if each site in the ring had well-known assets like a Lunr index and RSS feed, perhaps a convention/catalog of XMPP and email IDs like social@.

Thanks for the description.

I miss this too.

The centralization of google as a gateway to most internet content has nearly destroyed the penchant for individuals and groups to self organize online. Webrings are an example of group organization. Individuals used to make their own link pages or "home pages" with sections and categories.

You needed to discern and track which sites were full of useful content and which sites had veins of good links to other useful content. You were responsible for your own PageRank, instead of letting that muscle go flaccid and allowing a corporate entity maintain that in a locked black box beholden to who knows what.

I absolutely love this stuff. Just to add on here.

I highly recommend checking out the RC2014 project and it's various derivatives. Mr red fedora himself, Alan Cox very active on the mailing list: https://rc2014.co.uk/

Also check out the gigatron: https://gigatron.io/

I don't see this one mentioned much, but I had a lot of fun with this relay computer kit: https://www.tindie.com/products/jhallen/single-board-relay-c...

Someone else already mentioned Ben Eater's youtube channel, but it's worth noting he has two kits. One is a built out of logic gates, the other is 6502 based. https://eater.net/

Moving up the stack a fair bit, the commander X16 has a lot of people patiently awaiting it's arrival: www.commanderx16.com

Finally, there's plenty of stuff on Tindie. Here's one I've come across not too long ago. Note I have no experience with it and this is not an endorsement: https://www.tindie.com/products/glitchwrks/glitch-works-8085...

It's really inspiring to see so many people doing such a complex thing as a hobby. They all look really cool

>Please note the builders' email addresses have been obfuscated to foil spam harvesters. You will need to fix them up manually (ie change [at] to @).

Yeah, like the spambots haven't thought of that before.

I've got my email out there on my HN profile, and others. All using a unique alias to the same mailbox. None of those alises where I'm using at instead of @ have received emails.

I can only conclude spam bots aren't that good.

I'm surprised at how few spammers have stolen my non-GMail address from my public GitHub commits or my one AUR package. I've gotten one scam email within the last month, and none I can remember for the past few years before that.

I'll bet spammers assume anyone cautious enough to do the absolute minimum to obscure their email is too hard a target for anything but a higher-investment phishing attempt. The same reason they purposefully include spelling errors in bogus official emails; to get their targets to self-select.

Youtuber Usagi Electric is one person who is building a vacuum tube computer.

Ben Eater has a kit and Youtube series to build an 8-bit breadboard computer from common TTL IC chips.

I can also vouch for Ben Eater's videos, they're top notch educational material.

Loved Ben Eater's kit. His videos are awesome and the kit is a lot of fun to build.

I actually remember seeing this about 9 or 10 years or so ago! It no doubt inspired me to peruse a degree in Computer Science. Thanks for the nostalgia!