Death of Websites

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When I started writing a memory blog about my early internet experience and my blogging history a few weeks ago, I didn't know this post would be my most-read post on my website. I am flattered, actually. I wrote "I went on Blogger and made my first blog" in my early post (Early 2000s Memory Blog (Part-I)) but I didn't mention how and why I started writing a blog, or how I found out about Blogger. It's another interesting story too.

Let me begin this, my third part (you can read the second part here: AI Race, Where I Stand!). It was mostly about my first encounter with our homemade speaker and encounter with AI in 2023.

Some of you may find this interesting — my first search engine was not even Google. Read this memory blog first:

Notes, April 7, 2007 — First Time I Heard U2 Properly

I don’t even know how the cassette ended up in my house.
It was old, the sticker half torn, written in someone’s handwriting: U2 – The Joshua Tree.[1]

I didn’t know the band. I didn’t know anything except Nabin K. Bhattarai (Jim came later in my musical interest) and whatever played on Image Channel in the morning. Our cassette player would eat tapes sometimes, so I used a pen to fix the reels — the famous trick everyone knew back then.

I pressed play. “Where the Streets Have No Name.”[1] I had never heard anything like that in my life. It felt like someone opened a window inside my chest. The sound was so huge it made my small room feel smaller, but in a good way — like the walls were holding the music to keep it safe.

I didn’t understand the lyrics, but I felt them. Later, when I went to the cyber café, the first thing I typed on Google (very slowly; the keyboard keys were hard) was: “u2 best song.” The result took twelve seconds to load. I counted.

Before I started using the internet, there was one site called lyrics.ch for hosting lyrics, but in 1999 it ran into legal trouble and was shut down (see picture below at the end of the post) after many music company complaints.[2] After that, there was a vacuum in lyrics websites. There came one website with much elegance (for that time, see screenshot below) which I typed in Google.com: metrolyrics.com.[3] I read the lyrics of U2 for the first time and understood better.

Screenshot of Metrolyrics from archive.org


Now, thinking about the whole charade of internet use, I ponder how many websites have died along with our memories! How many websites gave us memories and have died! It is hard to answer, but sometimes you would remember something because of some extraordinary reason. So when it died suddenly in 2021, I felt bad because we had lived our history together.[3] But I advanced to Genius.com for music lyrics ever since.[4]

Sorry, I digressed a bit — I was talking about my first search engine and how and why I created a Blogger account.

Notes, June 19, 2008 — My First Search Engine Wasn’t Google

People won’t believe this in the future, but my first search engine wasn’t even Google.
It was Yahoo![5], and before that, I once used dodgeit.com (a weird email site) and Ask Jeeves[6], where a butler popped up on the screen and pretended he knew everything.

In 2003, Google still felt like a rumor.
Like: “Hey, did you try that clean-looking search thing? No ads, just the box?”

I loved Google because the page loaded even on slow dial-ups.
The cyber café used something called WorldLink Silver Package[7] back then — don’t know how I remember that.
The internet used to disconnect every 20 minutes, and the uncle would shout:

“Line gayo! Try again!”

Everyone groaned.


Screenshot of google from archive.org

In between the death of websites, there was one memorable site at that time that let users download music from their website. We used that website to download mostly Nepali music. Now it feels great to remember that webpage; it was too heavy and used to take a long time to load, even WorldLink Silver Package dial-up internet could barely handle it.[8] We gave hour after hour for this webpage to load and download music.

One thing: we never downloaded any of Nabin’s songs — we used to buy the albums. But still, it felt magical — typing something on a keyboard and watching knowledge crawl toward me like a slow, tired animal.


Screenshot of fursad.com from archive.org

Notes, September 2, 2003 — The Time I Discovered Nabin Again

It was already 2007, but for me Nabin K. Bhattarai was still brand new every time.
I found a website — fursad.com — and it looked ancient even then.
But they had something called “RealAudio Preview.”[9]

RealAudio? I literally covered my mouth with awe. No one today will know how holy that word sounded back then.

I clicked “Sanjha Pakha” and waited.
First: buffering 10%
Then: buffering 32%
Then: buffering 76%
Then: it crashed.

I tried again.
It loaded.

The quality was so bad it sounded like he was singing from inside a tin box, but I swear it felt like a personal concert. I had to lean close because the cyber café headphones were half broken. But the emotion was there — raw, real, perfect. That day I walked home feeling like I’d discovered something treasure-like, something only I understood, and I was thinking how cool it was to play music on a real website. It was the memory of the first real internet music.

Notes, 2009 — First Personal Computer

The moment came in 2009. We got our first personal computer — Intel Pentium 4,[10] unbranded case with Mercury motherboard. I don’t remember the clock speed or RAM size, but it must have had a 240GB hard drive (even not sure). But it was a moment to celebrate. And how did we celebrate? After spending thousands and thousands (no need to disclose how much we paid) to assemble that PC, the vendor had put some free music videos on the hard drive. Yes, we played (Lucky by Britney Spears[11] for the first time) and celebrated that way looking at a 14-inch CRT.

Now I had freedom to use a computer at home anytime — no need to run to a smelly cyber café and spend money to sit on a plastic chair. I now had many cool ideas in my head to play with the computer. First thing I was thinking: copy my notebooks digitally (remember from the previous blog that I had a Blogger account while I was using my cousin’s computer a few years ago? I made my Blogger account that time but never opened it afterward because I was busy chasing HI5[12]) to make them available for internet readers.

Notes, January 22, 2009 — Downloading a Single Song

People today won’t understand this: downloading one MP3 used to feel like winning a war. I had discovered something called BearShare[13] on one computer at the café a few months ago. It had a green alien face.
The uncle had told me not to use it because it brought “virus,” but I didn’t listen.

I searched U2 – One[1]
Clicked download.

The estimated time said:
1 hour 13 minutes.

I didn’t have that much money.
So I waited anyway, praying the line wouldn’t die.
Once it reached 89%, the internet disconnected.

I almost cried.
(Man, 20-year-olds in 2007 were dramatic.)

But now, with magic in my own palm, I started to download it again, sitting at home, drinking milk tea. This time it downloaded completely — 4.1 MB. I burned it onto a CD using Nero Burning ROM[14] (that application we bought from roadside CD shops). That CD became my treasure. I kept it wrapped in paper like it was something holy. I still have it, but there’s no way to use it because our modern technology has no CD player. What a mess we are living in.

Listening to music and writing notes on Yahoo 360[15] was awesome.

Notes, July 9, 2009 — My First Online Crush (If You Can Call It That)

She messaged me on Yahoo 3.
Just one line:

“Hi, I like your profile picture.”

If I showed people that picture today, they’d laugh.
It was me wearing a collar shirt with the top button closed (don’t know why I did that), hair messy, face too serious for a teenager (I wonder now, I cleaned that time with grumpy old philosophers too, but still I had that serious look — God knows why). It wasn’t even a digital photo — it was a scanned physical one. The scanner made my skin look like I had chickenpox. But she liked it. Or at least she said so.

I checked her profile. Low-quality photos with bright flash, like someone threw a torchlight at her face. Those were the days of Kodak KB-10 cameras, definitely I could say that. You didn’t take hundreds of photos; you took one, prayed it wasn’t blurry, and hoped nobody blinked. (We borrowed a camera from that neighbor; remember from the previous blog? The guy who built a homemade woofer — I will write someday about our first photograph experience with borrowed Kodak.)

I messaged her back after 47 minutes — didn’t want to seem desperate.

We talked for three weeks.
Slowly, shyly.
No emojis, no stickers. Just plain words. I used to share my small writings with her. She liked it.

I don’t even remember her name now.
But I remember the feeling — like someone finally saw me in a world where I barely existed — and after her disappearance, I started sharing similar writings on Blogger later to save them properly. I still have that first Blogger post archived on my Blogger web.


Screenshot of yahoo 360 from archive.org

Notes, March 8, 2010 — The Day of 64kbps Internet

Today our dial-up got a bit upgraded. The provider said, “Now we have 64kbps. Super fast!”[17] We believed him, but it was not even 56kbps like before for sure. I opened Hotmail. It loaded like a sleepy cow.
But at least Gmail didn’t crash this time, so yes, maybe we had good speed.

From that time, we started downloading movies: we were using torrents first, sometimes using Download Accelerator Plus (DAP)[14] — that green arrow icon that looked like it was meant for hacking, but we downloaded it anyway. That was our time. Our internet era.

The first movie we downloaded was: American Pie (1999).[18] It took the whole night to download. After that, we kept downloading movies using uTorrent. Later, I have 654 movies in my hard drive now, all downloaded using that speed. Recalling this whole saga, I think I was movie-enthusiastic.



from my hard drive: I short movies using IMDB ratings

I have to tell one more interesting thing here. It was the final year of LimeWire,[19] the free music download P2P network. We just happened to use it for a few months, but it shut down in 2010.[20] There were other sites as well, like Cooltoad (yes, that actually existed)[21] and Epkis.net (also existed)[22], which let us download free music. All died along with time. Before Spotify (I have never used it to this date, by the way), there were many sites including Napster (which was my best) but died too.[23] But some dead walk again — like Napster (see pic). At least that’s good news among many dead webs, is it not?


Screenshot of napster from napster

Screenshot of napster from napster



And I remember the first file that I had downloaded because it had a weird name — b3ut1fulD4y_finalmix_realoriginal.mp3.

This was U2’s song ‘Beautiful Day’[1]. I had to rename every song after downloading, file it, categorize it properly, and burn it on a CD. It was too much work, yet it was an exciting moment to live.

When I played it, a DJ shouted “DJ REMIX!!” at the beginning.

I laughed so hard I choked.

Still kept it.

Notes, December 12, 2011 — Reflections

I couldn’t afford much. Could barely afford cyber time, barely afford, barely afford cold drinks during exams. But curiosity made me richer than my pockets.

I remember that day (2005, March hopefully) when I was in a cyber café. I saw one guy playing a video on some site. It had ‘you’ in black and ‘tube’ in red — a simple-looking site but it had a powerful idea — I didn’t understand what it was. Then he played a video of a man jumping into a trampoline. A real video. Playing on the internet. No buffering for ten minutes. I whispered to myself:

“One day the whole world will waste time here.”

I was right.

Some web lives among the dead, and some resurrect again. Everything is a memory. Every small discovery — an email from a stranger, a song download, a new ringtone, a blog comment — felt like someone handing me a small torch in a dark tunnel. And maybe that’s why those years feel golden. Not because life was easy, but because everything was earned slowly.

Even happiness.

You said:
yah go on.

Right? And kept moving through dead webs.


Screenshot of youtube from archive.org

All Footnotes

  1. U2, The Joshua Tree, Island Records, 1987.

  2. Lyrics.ch — lyrics hosting website, 1999, shut down due to legal challenges from multiple music companies.

  3. MetroLyrics.com — lyrics website, accessed via archive.org snapshots (2000s–2021).

  4. Genius.com — lyrics and annotation platform, launched 2009.

  5. Yahoo! — popular search engine and portal, early 2000s.

  6. Ask Jeeves — search engine with animated butler, 1997–2006.

  7. WorldLink Silver Package — dial-up internet service in Nepal (early 2000s), ~56kbps.

  8. fursad.com — Nepali music download website, early 2000s.

  9. RealAudio — proprietary streaming audio format and technology, mid-1990s.

  10. Intel Pentium 4 — CPU, released 2000–2008.

  11. Britney Spears, …Baby One More Time, 1999 (Lucky single, 2000).

  12. HI5 — social networking site popular 2003–2010.

  13. BearShare — P2P music-sharing client, mid-2000s.

  14. Nero Burning ROM — CD/DVD burning software widely used in 2000s.

  15. Yahoo 360 — social networking/blogging platform, 2005–2009.

  16. Kodak KB-10 camera — consumer digital camera, early 2000s.

  17. 64 kbps dial-up — typical internet speed upgrade in Nepal circa 2010.

  18. American Pie — 1999 teen comedy film.

  19. LimeWire — P2P music-sharing software, 2000–2010.

  20. LimeWire shutdown — U.S. federal court order, October 26, 2010.

  21. Cooltoad — P2P file/music-sharing site, mid-2000s.

  22. Epkis.net — Nepali music download website, mid-2000s.

  23. Napster — P2P music-sharing service, original service 1999–2001, relaunched later.

  24. YouTube — video-sharing platform launched in 2005, quickly became dominant in online media.