God help you if you’re in the city this weekend.
Regular posting on Philebrity resumes on Tuesday morning.
Want more? Check out our nightlife listings, our art listings, or our movie times.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, that about wraps it up for the first-ever Philly Internet History Week, and we can’t help but get the feeling that we’ve only scratched the surface. Thanks to everyone who wrote in, and please, keep ‘em coming! Even as regular posting resumes after the holiday weekend, please feel free to send in [...]

AS TOLD BY COLLIN KEEFE: It all started for me one night back in the Fall of 1999 at Juke, Jerk and Jive, the dearly departed Wednesday party at Bob and Barbara’s where DJ Oz and Chef Jeff Simmers rocked soul music while serving up lip-smacking soul food. I had just moved back to Philly [...]

Didn’t most of you used to work there?

AS TOLD BY ED HOGARTY, CO-FOUNDER: Mike Kennedy and I had put Plot Twist records together to release our own band’s 7″ (Mesmer). We were interested in putting out stuff from other Philadelphia bands, but didn’t have the money or resources to do so. The mp3 collective seemed like a good way to keep the [...]

AS TOLD BY JEN OLIVER, CPCN USER FROM 1995-1996: I remember CPCN a little differently: While it carried the City Paper name, the telnet site seemed disconnected from the paper entirely. A bunch of people, though, remember it as one of the first Philly-based online communities.
I wasted many hours (and a shitload of money [...]

AS TOLD BY SARA GALLO, ARTIST & MUSICIAN: “Streaming Audio”
 
I’d first heard of this phenomenon right after moving into a loft space in Northern Liberties.  It was a crumbling quasi-squat, complete with roof leaks, sagging floors, etc.  I lived there along with 3 other people; most of us were UArts grads.  None of us had much money, and the [...]

AS TOLD BY KARL MARTINO, FOUNDER: Philly Future was one of the first regionally focused blogs that tried to share what people were talking about online, while trying to highlight the best, most interesting bloggers out of the Philly area. And it’s done as a labor of love for the city.
We launched way back in [...]

AS TOLD BY HOWARD ALTMAN, FORMER EDITOR, CITY PAPER: Back around the time that Al Gore invented the Internet, a chest-hair-twirling pre-cog named Bruce Schimmel divined the future.
“One day, son, all this will be yours,” he would say.
He wasn’t talking about the curtains.
Rather, he was talking about what was behind the curtains, in this case, [...]

AS TOLD BY JOHN MYERS, FOUNDER & EDITOR, NORTHERNLIBERTIES.ORG:While newspapers have been busy cutting staff and fumbling with embracing the Internet NorthernLiberties.org has morphed into a Wikipediaesque outlet for community news, gossip, rants & raves that traditional media are not covering effectively.
I have a love / hate relationship with NorthernLiberties.org. The site attracts its [...]

AS TOLD BY TRISHY GDOWIK: It was 1996, and I was living at my parents’ house in the suburbs, working as a lowly administrative assistant for a jewelry magazine. I was trying to save enough money to put a deposit on an apartment and rejoin civilization - e.g. move to the city. At least [...]

AS TOLD BY CONOR CORCORAN:As often bemused and bemoaned on this website, Philadelphia is a city of colossal contradiction and irony.
Our beloved metropolis, now an epicenter of the avant-garde in many aspects, is a parallel universe compared to the Philadelphia of the 1970s and 1980s. Our ne’er-do-well neighborhoods, once domains of deviance, [...]

AS TOLD BY KRISTY OSLYN: Back when NoLibs was still Northern Liberties. Before your mom talked about Flickr and Facebook. We got to thinkin’ we could do a site about some of our favorite things. A site about a dress we found that we loved, stationery made for the post, a new [...]

Back in the day — you know, before everyone got hooked on heroin at that one Spiritualized show and “screamo” was having its humble beginnings in the garages and VFWs of Doylestown and South Jersey — a young running enthusiast named Bryan Poerner started up a humble little DIY label called Trackstar Records. Trackstar [...]

Your mom still gets all her Internet video this way. Hahaha. Moms! I know!

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the interest of full disclosure, I, Joey Sweeney, must admit a fact I’ve been trying to shield for years: It was I who came up with the name of one of the stupidest Philly-born web ventures of all time — Philadelphia Weekly’s late-90s web startup, Brainsoap.com. Memories of that time (circa 1999) [...]

AS TOLD BY BEN KESSLER: When Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle was growing in popularity, myself and a friend, Jeff Vogel, thought to ourselves “Man wouldn’t it be funny to do the same thing with Hillary but in a negative connotation?” Thus, Hillary Is Mom Jeans was born! We added a little twist that [...]

AS TOLD BY ANDY SMITH:No discussion of Philadelphia Internet history can be complete without mentioning PREPnet, the original ISP in Pennsylvania. To us grizzled network engineers, PREPnet _was_ the Internet. If you wanted a blazing fast 56 Kb/s leased line to the ‘net, it came from PREPnet. T1 was for those who [...]

AS TOLD BY MEL “TOXIC” TAYLOR: In the 80’s and 90’s, I was a Philly Radio DJ at stations like WYSP, WDRE, WPST, WKDU, and WIFI. As a native Philadelphian, being on the air here was a dream come true. Working on the same team as Stern & Debella at WYSP, or being a [...]

AS TOLD BY PIERS MARCHANT: By 1999, shit had gotten figured out, at least to some degree, with respect to the Internet. The big players had emerged — Yahoo, Amazon, and, naturally, the service pipe-line for millions and millions of country bumpkins who were too afraid to dip more than their toes into the icy [...]