Back in 1994/1995 I was working for Faludi Computing Inc. as a consultant and we wanted to play around and get familiar with DNS. So, we decided to put a basic webserver up with a funny domain name to test configurations and how the DNS propagated out to the rest of the internet. The domain name I chose was
angry.org
Robert Faludi (founder of the appropriately named Faludi Computing) allows me to put the site up on our super fast (at the time) ISDN line. It was a very slow, pretty old Mac IIci with like 8 megs of RAM running WebStar and using basic html files. We had a CGI in there that would just take form submissions and email them to me so I could save them as html and post them back to the site.
Basically, people could submit the things they got angry about and I would post them unedited on the net. We got a lot of traffic. We got put on the ‘Cool Sites of the Week’ back in 1995 and then on Netscape (remember them?) ‘What’s Cool’ list. This basically shutdown the ISDN line for the business and nuked the IIci running MacOS 7 or an earliy version of 8 at the time. Anyway, got through that and went to an immediate publishing system with FileMaker and Lasso and WebStar. People could post directly to the web, which was big at the time. We also gave out free email addresses at @angry.org and got some press in a book back in the day from Hank Duderstadt on the world’s weirdest webpages (ISBN-13: 9781886411128)
More to follow as I remember the details…
The Internet Archive has some info and pages from angry.org way back when, but not so much. Work a look if you are interested.
Also, we had some people created satellite sites that amazingly have continued to persevere in the absence of angry.org. I know one still seems active @ angry.net. Pretty cool. Oh, and the reason I shut it down was because people got mad and starting to send threating legal letters, and I wasn’t making any money of it.
Sucks how that works.
If you have any good ideas on how angry.org could make a comeback and/or if you would like to assist or buy the domain outright and go with it.
Misc past links around angry.org
Take away corporate influence on the Web and what do you have? Original fun. – NYTimes.com (from 1996)
The Psychology Of The Internet – Google Books
The World’s Weirdest Web Pages: Hank Duderstadt: 9781886411128: Amazon.com: Books
Wondering why this page is getting so much activity all of a sudden…
cuz those of us remember and miss your website. I still have one of your pages printed out; something like “Angry at my selfish children”. Your site and Todd’s Disgusting Stories were the best!
Thanks soo much Larry. Ah the early days of the web and the freedom. I’ve thought often at what a reboot would look like but I wouldn’t want to police hate speech, etc nowadays. Tough content now and scary out there. Appreciate the comment and thank you!
I’m one of the few old farts left on the net that had the good fortune to experience angry.org in it’s prime. I have very fond memories of it. No matter what I may have been angry about, a quick trip to angry.org would expose me to groups of people even angrier. Really really angry, And witty. Within minutes, I always felt better.
When I navigated those hallowed pages of four letter word rage dispensing, the freedom of the old Internet was palpable (a feeling that’s hard to describe to those who’ve only known it’s current iteration).
Thank you for that very happy memory of a very different, very raw, very beautiful time of the Internet and my life. It’s one of the few memories of those early days that can still stir in me those emotions of total liberation, intellectual freedom, and nervous excitement that being on that Great Net then induced.
There is now, of course, an unfathomable amount of information on the web. New knowledge at my fingertips and such. That’s good too. But, I can’t help but think, perhaps…..perhaps I would trade it all for the old Net. For that fleeting feeling of being truly free. Intellectual anarchy. If only for a moment.
I miss that time dearly.
Hey, thank you for taking the time to comment on this. It truly was a different time as we were all trying to figure out what the Internet could and should be. Your comments made my day.
Take care,
Jonathan
Merg! I love that you still have this domain — I thought you’d let it go.
And long live the FlexMail CGI! Wasn’t that the tool you used for web-based form submissions in one of those iterations? That was my intro to web CGI’s. Ahh, such fond memories of when the web was still run mostly by techies, and not by corporations.
Dave!
Good to hear from you! I hope all is well!
– Jonathan
Please listen to the Misfits song Hate Breeders. In the chorus when they say “Hate Breeders” it somehow sounds like ANGRY DOT ORG!
Don’t ask me how one sounds like the other but it does. Maybe you could get Glen Danzig to buy the domain.
Seriously, it actually sounds like that.