Razorback Screenshots
Most of these pictures were submitted by other people to me through email or through a chat room I used to operate. It's been a long time since these came in, so I don't remember all the authors. They may contain redactions where deemed necessary.
September 23rd, 2020 - Preliminary shot of a Bigeye page weeks before the site's debut. You could guess I touched up those buttons at the top given their boundaries are so vague here.
October 5th, 2020 - The second screenshot of Razorback going live ever submitted, from TheOneGoofAli. It's only preceded by an Android screenshot.
October 6th, 2020 - One day after Razorback's debut. As with many shots to come, it renders exactly as you'd expect here in Classilla - a browser for Mac OS 8/9 which I think was discontinued months after this shot. Submitted by LuxuryAerozona.
October 6th, 2020 - This was shortly followed by the first photographic evidence that the web still exists on DOS. Arachne 1.97 for DOS, a marvel in software for those still not up to speed on Windows 95 or something.
October 22nd, 2020 - Shortly after the site's debut, an RSS feed was added. For most of its life, I was typing in the entries manually... UGH!!
November 8th, 2020 - Connected to Razorback on an HP Jornada running some version of Windows CE. It looks like a network card is indeed plugged into the machine.
November 12th, 2020 - Me trying to slipstream Internet Explorer 5.5 into a Windows 98 remaster called Redtoast, which proved too much to deal with. The hell with that project.
November 14th, 2020 - WebView, a very minimalistic web browser that doesn't render images. I don't know what operating system this is tied to.
November 17th, 2020 - Wait, who's that?!
December 8th, 2020 - Wow, the Internet Channel. I was hooked on messing with that for a while when it was first available, and then completely forgot about it.
January 8th, 2021 - A shot of the short lived IRC server. A shame, but no one really cared about it much. IRC is dead. HexChat's last update was from 2024, and it no longer even appears in Arch's repository.
January 14th, 2021 - Ohohoho... this shot is just gorgeous. All that's needed now is to roll back the operating system at least several versions. :P
February 6th, 2021 - A major update to Razorback was published, which positioned the site as a call to action for leaving social media, and introduced "blips". These were its short-form text posts, submitted via a direct SQL query from a shell. It would take much longer for full-blown articles to get the same treatment. It was really clunky, but it worked. Also, this image is proof that I am dead.
February 11th, 2021 - Razorback has hosted some Cinepak AVIs early on, but never went all in on it until the following year.
February 13th, 2021 - If I had to guess, this would be Plan 9 from Bell Labs here? Sort of a Blit-like interface, barely remember touching it once myself.
April 5th, 2021 - Just how many browsers were created before the Dotcom bubble? I haven't heard of anything other than Internet Explorer and Netscape back then.
May 20th, 2021 - By this time, quite a few people got on board for hosting their sites on my server. Some of them have held out to the bitter end!
June 2nd, 2021 - Another shot from someone of Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 3.1x. I think by then, I had been supplying my own modified installers for some releases of Internet Explorer.
September 3rd, 2021 - Another RSS reader, pretty sure this pertains to KDE. This was around the time I canned the overly ambitious Cisco project. I would've probably regretted it anyway, as I've found that collaborations have often been followed by undesirable outcomes.
October 17th, 2021 - This was definitely one of the funniest screenshots. Just goes to show that you could load this page practically anywhere, like how Doom runs on literally everything. And NetBSD. If only we got this on a McDonald's kiosk or some billboard. Oh well.
October 17th, 2021 - Another shot of Source's inline browser. This depicts the "light mode" I shoehorned into Razorback around this time. Never really looked good in hindsight.
October 28th, 2021 - And then, we return to the classic, the tried and true: Razorback on Windows 95D Lite. In 2025, the "Lite" moniker was dropped.
November 7th, 2021 - Razorback's QuakeWorld server became quite popular thanks to regular attendance from the DOSBox Deathmatch Club. Even after the site shut down, this game server continued to operate over here until October 27th, 2025.
December 22nd, 2021 - Matrox G400, one of the few video cards which had a driver for Windows 3.1x supporting high color at 1600x1200. Definitely my own shot.
January 10th, 2022 - A homepage of Akage Megane, whom we then only referred to as THEBaratusII. This is just one of the websites Razorback provided hosting for.
January 29th, 2022 - OBAMA BROWSER
April 7th, 2022 - I was also a designer for the Blue OS Museum site which Razorback hosted, and converted the old Discord review logs to HTML pages. Here, I used it as a testing ground for developing a proper video index on Razorback.
April 10th, 2022 - Wow, is that a pool table? Is it safe for diving?
May 27th, 2022 - Another major milestone: an entire DOS game programmed in 8086 assembly by my own hand. Here it's running on a Toshiba T3100e. Could be one of the more chaotic and fast paced games for 80's DOS computers, yet remains perfectly playable on a Pentium 4 as well!
June 4th, 2022 - ew yucky
June 28th, 2022 - This is when Razorback took to the extreme, where I slowly but surely added nearly ALL of my videos on there. It was a nightmare, but scripting helps a ton. Due to the increased capacity requirement driving up costs, this feature ended up killing the website. There was no way I could continue to keep it going like that given updates had slowed to a crawl, anyway.
August 7th, 2022 - A shot of NetBSD running Dillo. I took this myself using my Asus K7M build.
November 1st, 2022 - While it counts as a Razorback screenshot, this was more of a demonstration of the Program Manager still lingering in Windows 98, using a higher resolution than I could ever get out of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. The days before fanmade universal drivers... this was made for Hardcore Windows 98, originally as a Razorback exclusive segment.
January 17th, 2023 - Once again, running Internet Explorer 3 in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, this time in a more normal resolution for the operating system. This was a couple weeks after my next major update to Razorback, which streamlined the procedure of submitting articles from my end. With far less manual overhead involved by this time, it proved highly encouraging to output more articles once again.
February 11th, 2023 - Celebrating the 10th anniversary of some EAS hijacking incident where some guy in a deep voice broadcasted a message about a zombie apocalypse.
June 17th, 2023 - This one could've only been sent to me via email. This is the Charon browser, also in Plan 9.
August 11th, 2023 - Somewhere around this time, it became clear to me that Razorback's codebase was jank and mostly patchy, practically hacked into what was originally a purely static website. After a significant update from earlier that year, I decided that I wanted to rewrite it from the ground up. But I also wanted Sardine Engine to be easily adaptable to other sites as well, so they could get the same superpowers of Razorback, and some of their own. For that, I was primarily working on internal copies of DOSBox Deathmatch Club and Blue OS Museum with its code in place to prove its modularity. Most of this information displayed here was retrieved from a MariaDB database. Later, a row was added to the table calculating an event success rating based on the logs. None of this ever saw the light of day. Switching from procedural to object oriented code was a nightmare...
October 1st, 2023 - My own screenshot of Razorback in Konqueror. By this time, I was already preparing to wind down operations for the site.
November 13th, 2023 - In which I bid my final goodbye to Razorback, before scaling down to a smaller server with the expectation that one day it could have become a complete and more robust website of its own.
March 26th, 2024 - There, Drevonor remained a largely constant parking page, cold and isolated. Despite all the plans, so it shall perish, too.
August 3rd, 2026 - Razorback still operates in an internal server used for testing, as do the currently broken Sardine Engine projects continue to exist.
For all its shortcomings, Razorback had something the biggest websites did not: the thrill of connecting from anything and anywhere, and the enthusiasm of coming back for more (while allowing you to check out quickly). I wouldn't give up what I've learned from it for anything, and I hope one day I may be able to return to running a website like it. For now, though, the climate does not permit this, nor does my will. With this off my mind, I strive for something else...
Shutdown Announcement