About

Table Of Contents

Hello! 👋🏻 I’m Noah, and this is my “modern retro home page!”

This website was just started on Sept. 2 2025 and is very much a work in progress! I will be fleshing out this page and a lot of others in the coming days!

About Me

I’m Noah, a 37yo introvert and computer nerd currently living in Oregon.

I’ve always been fascinated by computers ever since we got our first family PC when I was 5. It was an old Tandy computer from the early 1990’s, and it ran Windows 3.1 on top of MS-DOS. Back then, it was basically necessary that you learned how to operate a computer, especially when you got yourself locked in MS-DOS mode and had to debug your way out of a text mode terminal!

I got to witness the whole evolution of technology from there: through Windows 95 & 98, getting onto the Internet, the wild west of the early Web, Geocities and Myspace, the rise of Facebook and modern social media, and the homogenization of the modern Web we live in today. All the apps & websites now look the same, bland and devoid of color and character.

(will write more later…)

About This Site

I had first gotten onto the Internet in the year 1999 when I was 12 years old, and very soon after, I taught myself how to make my own websites in HTML, inspired by all the “Early Web” sites I was finding online.

Back then, it seemed like ’everybody’ had their own personal home page, and each one was colorful and unique. We didn’t quite have Google Search yet, so we would network our own websites together with ‘Web Rings’ and sign each other’s Guestbooks.

In 2025 I was inspired by the Indie Web movement, and the resurgance of nostalgic things like Neocities and SpaceHey (who are faithfully bringing back the spirit of Geocities and MySpace). Browsing around the websites and profiles there, it’s so cool seeing people create new hot trash websites full of character and personality like the early Web. I love it!

Compared to the modern social media we have in 2025, it’s an exciting change of pace to kick it old school. It’s hella nostalgic for sure, anyway!

This site will be like a “living time capsule” where I will gather up all my own period correct artwork (pre-2012 or so), as well as a “Shrine” to some of my favorite Old Web content from the early 2000’s.

For my modern personal home page and blog, see Kirsle.net: that is my first domain name from back in high school, and has been online continuously since 2008 in more or less its current form. It’s always kept a somewhat retro charm (with color & style) all these years, but has been renovated to keep up with modern technology (the joy when I could ditch IE 6 support! And responsive design for mobile!)

My Actually Old Websites

When I first got online in 1999, we had dial-up Internet for the first couple of years, with Juno as our ISP. Juno also just so happened to be incubating a little company called Homestead who had a visual website builder, a Java applet that allowed one to visually drag-and-drop a web page together.

I think I was immediately making my own websites with it; probably Pokémon fan sites, and some of my 6th grade classmates at school had their own too and we’d check out each other’s pages.

Soon, I taught myself how to write HTML properly and started hosting them on places like Geocities or Tripod.

Unfortunately, not very many of my early websites survived to this day. It wasn’t long until I taught myself Perl when I was 14, originally because I wanted to build my own chatbots for AIM, but I began using Perl also to build ever more complicated websites.

I still have a lot of that old Perl code, but, Perl requires a whole web server set up for it to run, and I don’t really trust my old coding skills to put those websites back online again. I’ve grown a lot as a software developer, and my old sites were probably full of bugs!

However, I did manage to keep a couple of plain old, classic, pure HTML sites around from way back when, in my backups that I kept since high school:

• Syrus (Myst fan site): this may be the oldest website I have, which I built when I was 13 years old if the About page is accurate. It was a fan site for the Myst & Riven videogames by Cyan.

  It uses an old-school frameset and an image map on the home page! Surprisingly those still work well in modern (desktop) browsers.

• The Land of No Return: this website is about a story I began making up when I was 12 and worked on until I was about 15.

  I don’t know when this particular website was first built, but it was last touched in 2003.

  When the hamster wheel in my head got spinning about Neocities and retro sites, my first idea was to tidy up that site and put it back online! It has some Flash applets, games and lots of cringe old stuff!

Those websites may not be very mobile friendly, but that’s because they both pre-dated the rise of mobile phones!

My Modern Websites

I’ll leave a link a few modern websites I run today:

• Kirsle.net is my modern personal home page & web blog.
• Sketchy Maze is about my videogame project, a drawing-based maze game.
• RiveScript is my chatbot scripting language, which I started working on at 15 and have ported it to 5 different programming languages!