For what it's worth, MySpace prior to officially being a social media site was created in '96 and officially launched as a internet network drive around 1999 cant remember the exact date, then was later sold to Murdoch and evolved more into a social media site later on but was already unofficially used as one. People shared music, short movies, porn. It didn't scale well as there was no de-duplication, files were stored in an EBCDIC database on a couple HP Surestore's which I and others upgraded a few times from 9TB to 18TB comprised of 4 and 9 GB drives, then eventually 18 GB drives.

That was XDrive. I don't think the name MySpace came around till the social network in 2003. The sale to Murdoch was 2005.

It was definitely Myspace in 1996+. Perhaps they didn't start marketing the brand until 1999? I had to register about 50 variants of that domain name in 99' for them using the all so much fun email template with Internic. As to what relationships they had with other companies I have no clue. The HP SureStore's left the dataceter in 2002 or 2003. I met their CEO in 1999 when they were going to launch the drive space feature. As a fun side note they were the only customer I was ever allowed to let into the datacenter.

Some of the domain variants were MyLinuxSpace, MyBSDSpace, MyWindowsSpace and so on...

The founder of MySpace came from XDrive so I assumed XDrive is what is being referred to here. Wikipedia suggests this too, with MySpace starting later as a new company, but it states that the early team were inspired by social features in some other existing software. Maybe that was called MySpace and is what you are talking about. Would love to read more about it

Startups were a little odd back then. Some would be in the process of changes but the employees wouldn't know until they pulled the trigger. I am just guessing but maybe you saw the exit stage of XDrive and I saw the entry of Myspace but there was some hush-hush secret overlap. It certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing I saw back then.

Was this just like s/ftp accounts? Or something more complex like a 1996 dropbox? It was a mounted filesystem in your machine?

It was a drive letter mounted on your Windows machine or a mount point on Linux. I forgot what protocol was used and I never personally used it as I had my own SFTP servers. On Windows people would run an app but I think it was just mounting a SMB drive. I only handled the backend storage, HP-UX servers and DNS for them. Other people managed the Windows servers and their company managed the applications.

Neat. I was 10 back then but I remember having to deal with IPX networking to play Warcraft 1-2 with my dad, and over Mplayer, or some sort of online game service IIRC. Never really thought about how you'd do a mounted network share back then. IPX was a pain but we had no idea what we were doing back then.

edit: Oh duh, battlenet.. sigh, my how blizzard has changed.

I'm going to take a guess this was FUSE.

More likely to be WebDAV, which was the 'great hope' for cloud storage before it was called cloud.

FUSE was 2004, so it's anyone's guess.

Yeah, also everything loads too fast. And maybe too many colors (too high a bit-depth).

By 1999, most would have been on 24-bit color, or "millions of colors" as Apple called it. Most images are still 24-bit today.

Looking at his neocities (self made) profile, he's 45-50.

https://billsworld.neocities.org/profile/

The favorites also has a Dr Who page that features David Tennent and Freema Agyeman, who didn't appear on the show until 2006.

Yeah except it's known that they can travel through time and space, so that one makes sense.

99% odds artistic license.

1% odds anything else.

It's better that way. The feel of 1999 was there in 1998 and yes, the distant future, the year 2000.

Was going to say that Friendster is not as cool, but only just realized it came out the same year as MySpace did... whoa

And Tomoyasu Hotei didn't release "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" (the autoplaying MIDI) until 2000 ;)