Why I Created This

Why Doors 98 was created — from AI hallucinations to internet preservation.

From the desktop window

There were a few reasons I decided to do this. Over Christmas 2025, I finally had time to mess around with the current wave of AI agents (the rage being Claude Opus). I quickly put it to work, extending a Python backend I hadn't touched since 2019 and expanding its capabilities while also creating supporting UI tools. All of this came together in just a couple of days' work that would have taken me literally months to do by hand.

As one might expect, a range of feelings came over me. First, excitement ("Look at all the things I can do!"). Then anxiety ("As someone with 20+ years in software, am I going to be obsolete?"). Finally, a sort of meh acceptance ("I'm glad I'm in my 40s—or I'd be screwed. I guess I'll settle into being a 'prompt engineer' or move into management.")

This made me reminisce about a simpler time. Signing into an AOL screen name. Hearing the iconic "You've got mail!" Chatting with your buddies—IM'ing, not this DM'ing nonsense. No emojis; we called them emoticons. Chat rooms. Winamp blaring "Superman" by 3 Doors Down. Napster to build our music libraries before Lars sent it all to the dumpster (to this day, I still have many MP3s from that era).

Online gaming was in its infancy: spending time playing Age of Empires in MSN Zone, or Gin Rummy on Yahoo. We had eight different search engines (Google was still in its infancy)—AltaVista, Lycos, and others. High school and college kids built fan sites for their favorite book series, games, or bands. Professional sites were few—eBay, eToys (RIP)—and by today's standards looked basic and horrendous.

Time out..You are probably thinking

Or…

You're probably right. Why? A midlife crisis? Maybe. But the time really did feel simpler—no social media, most people didn't have phones, and those who did mostly just used them to call. Texting was limited (and you paid per text!). The web had less drama; you were more anonymous, and there was genuine excitement about what was coming next.

I figured: if you lived it, maybe this is a nice trip down memory lane. If you're younger, maybe there's some amusement here—or even a bit of history to be learned.

Yes, most of this is a parody (for legal reasons), but I'm confident you'll get the gist of the era. Some parts, however, are more authentic. The fan site? That was mine. You can find the real thing if you're willing to dig through the Wayback Machine. Those screen names in the buddy list were real people from my actual AIM list. There were more, but their screen names were close enough to their real identity that I left them out.

So this site is part experiment, part time capsule, and part love letter to an era when the web felt smaller, weirder, and more human. It's not about saying things were better—just different. Slower. Less optimized. More personal. An era of Flash intros, sketchy ActiveX prompts, and wondering whether clicking "Yes" was about to nuke your family PC. An era when Strong Bad taught us how to type, Newgrounds kept our browsers busy, fan sites ruled, and the internet felt like it was made by people, not platforms.

The irony is not lost on me that AI wrote nearly this entire site—with the exception of this letter (aside from cleaning up my poor grammar… and this concluding paragraph, because I tend to meander). If this makes you smile, cringe, or feel the urge to fire up an old MP3—or hunt down a browser that can still run Flash—then it's doing exactly what it was meant to do.

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Update Spring 2026:

What I didn't expect was how far down the rabbit hole it would go. As I dug through old drives, I kept finding things I hadn't surfaced in years — a full flat-file backup of a fan forum I ran in 2002, a Morpheus playlist from 2001, school assignments going back to 1997 with the original bugs intact, real emails from a 2004 MMORPG session, software from fan communities that had long since vanished from the internet. Some of it turned out to be genuinely rare — lost media sitting on hard drives across three or four machines, migrated forward for twenty years, never uploaded anywhere. And the deeper I went into Wayback Machine logs of sites I used to haunt, the more there was to find. At that point the project became something more than parody. The OS shell is still satiric — but what's inside it is real. Real posts. Real files. Real communities. I wasn't planning to be an archivist. But here we are.

Why I Created This

I figured: if you lived it, maybe this is a nice trip down memory lane. If you're younger, maybe there's some amusement here—or even a bit of history to be learned.

AIM buddy list screen names featured on this site: AcousticguitarJJ, Airyn15, AkinaSpecialist, arieeas, BerlaR2833, BigMan828, Brandocom18, Ccmfan2911, Chr0n02222, CrAzZziE2, crownchicken, chubbsaudio, DodgeViper830, ELF0926, ElMono597, fatboyjin, FirstClassNerd, Flagpig, ForeignSpeed96, gumby3484, GuyandGuitar20, Hopeintomorrow, HourOfTen, irishred384, jaguarjaws, KellBel324, KLinkafer84, Krissy93, KSmith1184, KyleeJane03, KyleShidair, LAXin204, Ledzep6222, LindsRay01, LordArkmam, MATT1T0N, MrPlah, niffirg20, phatboy615, phoenix2218, Prolifik51, qibiNg1, realm720, Saviorluv, SickOnSnow, skriker113, Softbalweb, Sprtmn14, studlee1100, swoops40, teddybearperson, TFrock69, TG3VIP2, TheMudDotCom, Thermos14, TrinityFaith2784, TrooperandZ, yep3022, Z06chic, Zuluproffitt5.

The irony is not lost on me that AI wrote nearly this entire site—with the exception of this letter. If this makes you smile, cringe, or feel the urge to fire up an old MP3—or hunt down a browser that can still run Flash—then it's doing exactly what it was meant to do.

Update Spring 2026: What I didn't expect was how far down the rabbit hole it would go. As I dug through old drives, I kept finding things I hadn't surfaced in years — a full flat-file backup of a fan forum I ran in 2002, a Morpheus playlist from 2001, school assignments going back to 1997 with the original bugs intact, real emails from a 2004 MMORPG session, software from fan communities that had long since vanished from the internet. Some of it turned out to be genuinely rare — lost media sitting on hard drives across three or four machines, migrated forward for twenty years, never uploaded anywhere. And the deeper I went into Wayback Machine logs of sites I used to haunt, the more there was to find. At that point the project became something more than parody. The OS shell is still satiric — but what's inside it is real. Real posts. Real files. Real communities. I wasn't planning to be an archivist. But here we are.