this page is meant to be a montage of the many things that made up our lives in the 1990's - 2010's, but have been lost to the greed and blight of companies and over evils plaguing the world today. to start off:
you may have seen this kind of controller before - it may even be nostalgic to you. a lot of people around the world today miss this kind of design - whether it be to nostalgia, ease of use, and a lot of other reasons. a lot of other devices had this look to them - like consoles, mp3 players, other handhelds, translucent crt monitors, keyboards, etc. a lot of other people around the world also want these types of devices to return to the consumer market - they are even relatively common. or, if you want to go down a different path, technology in prisons have to be completely translucent/transparent to show their contents... just like some other aesthetics today, this has been brought back into the world but has been changed, or somewhat corporatized:
if you want to buy a controller with this aesthetic today, you can do so at 
, dedicated brands like 8bitdo, or even the XBOX website itself. however, even with transparent things making a resurgence, they have lost a lot of their charm thanks to the differing components on the inside.
around the time Y2K was happening, new genres of technology, fashion, design, whatever else started to pop up everywhere - 'cyber Y2K', or Y2K Futurism, was one of these aesthetics at the time. Y2K Futurism was generally characterised by the early era of digital 3D rendering, minimalism/maximalism, chrome colour schemes, differing landscapes, etc. in terms of clothing, chrome/glossy colours, vector objects - like stars, rings, etc. - were usually used for designs at the time. probably most notably where the aesthetic appeared would be technology/computers; this aesthetic started to take hold around the time Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X, the PS2, iPod, and original XBOX were released - you can see this style throughout their UI. later on, this would branch off to a lot of different paths, like webcore and gen x soft club. this was a time when most computers had (around 128) MB of ram - and GPUs as a whole were in an early state, as brands like 3dfx, ATI, and even nVidia were duking it out to develop the best consumer graphics card. also, Y2K didn't happen because a lot of geniuses worked together (something you don't see a lot of these days) to fix the problem - just like what happened with CrowdStrike, except the world basically went down with CrowdStrike. this came beside games like unreal tournament and quake 3 - both very notable FPS games of their era. these games had a very vast effect on FPS games as you can still see some elements of them today in games like ULTRAKILL and doom eternal. all of this pretty much faded when 2005 came around - this was the time when computer specs started to improve a lot, and when the Aqua and Aero themes were representative of Mac OS X and Windows; along with aesthetics we have today like frutiger aero. Y2K has made a resurgence on social media platforms, like tiktok (although i wouldn't go on this platform in the first place) and dedicated communities like r/y2kaesthetic on reddit! this 'appendix' really mainly covers the hardware/culture of Y2K, as the internet and online parts of this era are a marginally different rabbit hole... i wish we could go back to these times. if you like the music part of this era though, check out artists like MASTER BOOT RECORD - some pieces of modern day music are reminiscent of Y2K.
from the very birth of the internet, websites have been a crucial way of representing information or text on a screen. over time, different websites have been made for different reasons, whether it be to help corporations, for education, or personal charm. in the 1990s though, websites had a different look to them because of hardware limitations - they didn't have complex headers/footers, sliders, nothing like that, atleast not until css/javascript was starting to get widely supported and used. this look was widely restricted, as mass formatting of pages came bundled with css - you couldn't really align an element free-flowing, or in an exact place on a page. also, to make a website at the time, you would need to have extensive(ish) knowledge on how to actually make one - until geocities appeared in 1995. geocities was revolutionary in it's website hosting specialty, as anyone who signed up could make a website, even if you didn't know how to beforehand! at the time, personal websites were only allowed 2 MB of space - a five-hundredth of what you get with a free neocities account today. that may seem small, but files in the 1990s - early 2000s weren't that big, atleast compared to today's values. this was partially due to the modems that were used, 56k modems (the most popular modems at the time) only had a download speed of 56 kiloBITS per second. because 1 byte is 8 bits, that download speed was 7 kilobytes per second, leading to other forms of media like music taking hours, or movies days. this also added to the charm of the websites made with geocities - 'low' quality images/gifs (in terms of quality today) were plastered all over to not heighten the loading time of the sites too much. what was also happening around the time was the dawn of the dot-com bubble - a (soon to be) stock market crash that included loads of startups that were similar to sites you see today - like boo.com against eBay. during the bubble, a lot of these startups flourished, due to the influx of newbies on the world wide web. however, just like with the Wall Street Crash in the 1930s - this bubble burst and took down pretty much all of the startups with it - boo.com was no more. this also caused a lot of problems for massive e-commerce sites like amazon and eBay, although when they came out of the bubble, their sales/profits had skyrocketed. around this time, as opposed to today, companies' logos were actually quite complex/not oversimplified. take the Windows logo as a BIG, even COLOSSAL example of this - it went from being a colourful flag to a bland, monochromatic, not even skewed (anymore) image. sadly, like most other things related to corporations, this is symbolic of a lot of things today. as time went on, however, the pixels on a monitor started to grow smaller, and smaller...
...until we were struck with frutiger aero! frutiger aero was a breakthrough in terms of design, involving technological, social, and even corporate advancements. it was also a step up from the Y2K aesthetic, which brought on low-colour displays dictated by the limiting hardware around that time. common elements of frutiger aero would be it's glass frames, skeuomorphism*, nature, and much more.