Author’s Note: This article was originally written in HTML, viewed in Netscape Navigator, and printed on a dot-matrix printer. The back button is your friend.
You went to LinksCorner. LinksCorner wasn't a search engine. It wasn't a social network. It was a human-curated directory of directories . The premise was brutally simple: a static HTML page, usually with a forest-green background and a horizontal rule divider, listing links to other "cool sites."
But it was the quality of those links that mattered. linkscorner
But the spirit of LinksCorner never died. It lives on in every "Awesome Lists" GitHub repository, every curated newsletter, and every subreddit wiki. It is the eternal reminder that algorithms are fast, but human curation is meaningful.
By linkscorner
If you were building a website in 1998, you had a problem. You had figured out how to code a blinking <h1> tag and how to embed a MIDI file of "Wind Beneath My Wings." But what about the rest of the web? How did you tell visitors where to go next?
Before the age of social algorithms, before the "For You" page decided what you saw, there was the hyperlink. And in the quiet, pixelated dawn of the commercial internet, one name appeared on thousands of Geocities pages, Angelfire sites, and university homepages: . Author’s Note: This article was originally written in
Today, if you search the Wayback Machine, you can still find fragments of LinksCorner. They look like relics: pixel art, counters stuck at "004,201 visitors," and links to sites that now redirect to domain squatters.
