Journey to a simpler time—the 1990s—when personal Geocities websites ruled and your biggest health concern was contracting dysentery on The Oregon Trail. In a year of crisis, change, and anxiety, a little nostalgia can go a long way toward taking our minds off global strife.
Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team understands that, which is why they’ve launched E.gg—an attempt to recapture the “low-pressure” atmosphere of ’90s web surfing. “We started working on E.gg after a few of us found ourselves missing a certain raw and exploratory spirit that was so emblematic of The Early Internet,” according to the product page.
“Sure, it was clumsy to use—dangerous at times, even,” it continued. “But in that awkward mess was a weird and enlivening bazaar of manically blinking GIFs, passionate guestbook entries, personal web pages made by people who cared deeply about a niche interest of theirs and wanted to simply carve out their own digital space.”
Sign up now for early access to the app, which invites users to create free-form mixed media collages “that let you express anything”—from a ranking of every Taylor Swift album to a montage of succulent pics to an “About” page for your dating profile. Drag, drop, and resize a variety of content (images, GIFs, text etc.) to best represent your vision. To encourage true innovation, the NPE team eliminated likes and comments.
Canvases are created in the iOS app, but can be shared and viewed anywhere via a personalized URL—no logins or downloads required. Likewise, users can discover other creators by following certain content like a plant or ping pong paddle emoji.
“Our hope is that over time, E.gg will grow ever-closer to realizing [certain creative] ideals, and in that process carve out a small pocket in which that raw and wondrous ethos of the early internet might again find itself a bit of breathing room,” the product page said.
With that in mind, Facebook also noted that “we are not looking to create a 90s throwback platform.” Rather, they built E.gg “to enable all sorts of content/visual styles (ideally, the rougher the better).” Interested iOS users can join the waitlist; for more updates, follow the new platform on Instagram.
(Photo via Felix Rieseberg)
If that’s not enough to cure your nostalgia, Slack developer Felix Rieseberg created an app that emulates Mac OS 8. The color-heavy operating system, released by Apple in the summer of 1997, became one of the company’s most commercially successful software releases, selling more than 1.2 million copies in the first two weeks.
The app—which runs on Windows, Linux, and, of course, macOS—comes preinstalled with familiar titles like The Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons, according to the program’s GitHub page. Rieseberg also included old-school favorites Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, and the Apple Web Page Construction Kit.
