Any other furries have a fascination with oldschool furry media?

[Tetrachroma]

One of my favorite fandom-related hobbies is scouring the web for old archives of furry content from 1990-ish to around 2010. I've only been in the fandom since 2016, but I'm so enthralled by this stuff - it's fascinating to peer into the world of furry when it was still in its early years. I've even sunken a good few hours into FurryMUCK, which I was astonished to find still has a daily high of ~150 users.
To be honest, I'm a little disheartened by how much these things have been lost to the ages. I realize internet culture moves at lightspeed these days, but it would be cool if all this historic media which helped shape our fandom were discussed a little more to this day.
But that's enough rambling from me, is there anyone else out there who shares the same interest as me? Specifically those of you who weren't part of the fandom back then? I'd like to know I'm not alone in these ventures.

Also if anyone's interested, here's some links to my favorite webpages for old furry schtuff:

Spoiler: Links

The VCL - A furry art archive which started in November 1995. (Contains NSFW art, has no content filters)
Yerf archive - Browsable archive of Yerf, an SFW art site which ran from 1996 to around 2006.
Confurence.com - The official webpage of the very first furry convention which hosted from 1989 to 2003. Includes some photos and videos from ConFurence and other cons that existed around that time period.
Sabrina Online - A webcomic that ran from 1997 to 2016. Not written very well in my opinion, though I do appreciate it for its historic value and for just how frickin long it lasted.
Furry Fandom History playlist - My personal YouTube playlist of convention videos recorded before 2010. Very Anthrocon-heavy as that's what I could mostly find.
FurryMUCK - Text-based multi-user dungeon that started in 1990 and still sees a fair amount of activity to this day. I recommend connecting to this server (and any MU* really) using the BeipMU client.
The Fursuit Archive... Archive? - An absolutely enormous database of convention photos and videos. Seriously, they have tons of pics from almost every year of every con there.
Bluefurry (oekaki) - An oekaki art board hosted on what appears to be a furry's personal webpage. Oekaki, as used in the fandom's earlier years, is an art form characterized by simplistic rendering and somewhat pixelated linework - it's the style that I most associated with oldschool furry before diving into this hobby. (Most of this board is SFW but there's a small amount of very NSFW art here as well)

If you've stumbled upon this post from some time far in the future (greetings, traveler!) and any of the above links don't work, check to see if archive.org has any snapshots of these webpages. You might still be able to harvest some goodies that way.

 

[lolox]

Wow, my old stuff is still hosted on VCL. That feels so weird.

 

[Yastreb]

I am interested in the early furry fandom too, it's so interesting to see where we have came from. It is always cool to find some piece of furry art that is older than me.

Here is the FA page of Steve Gallacci, the guy who pretty much founded the furry fandom as we know it. You can find some pretty old stuff there. His main work, the Erma Felna comic, can most easily be read here.

Also worth mentioning is the webcomic Freefall which has been active from 1998 and still updates thrice a week.

 

[Tetrachroma]

I am interested in the early furry fandom too, it's so interesting to see where we have came from. It is always cool to find some piece of furry art that is older than me.

Here is the FA page of Steve Gallacci, the guy who pretty much founded the furry fandom as we know it. You can find some pretty old stuff there. His main work, the Erma Felna comic, can most easily be read here.

Also worth mentioning is the webcomic Freefall which has been active from 1998 and still updates thrice a week.

Thanks for the links!

 

[Ziggy Schlacht]

God I used VCL before FA because I didn't need an account. The art is so... old. Traditional media everywhere!

 

[Mambi]

One of my favorite fandom-related hobbies is scouring the web for old archives of furry content from 1990-ish to around 2010. I've only been in the fandom since 2016, but I'm so enthralled by this stuff - it's fascinating to peer into the world of furry when it was still in its early years. I've even sunken a good few hours into FurryMUCK, which I was astonished to find still has a daily high of ~150 users.
To be honest, I'm a little disheartened by how much these things have been lost to the ages. I realize internet culture moves at lightspeed these days, but it would be cool if all this historic media which helped shape our fandom were discussed a little more to this day.
But that's enough rambling from me, is there anyone else out there who shares the same interest as me? Specifically those of you who weren't part of the fandom back then? I'd like to know I'm not alone in these ventures.

Also if anyone's interested, here's some links to my favorite webpages for old furry schtuff:

Spoiler: Links

The VCL - A furry art archive which started in November 1995. (Contains NSFW art, has no content filters)
Yerf archive - Browsable archive of Yerf, an SFW art site which ran from 1996 to around 2006.
Confurence.com - The official webpage of the very first furry convention which hosted from 1989 to 2003. Includes some photos and videos from ConFurence and other cons that existed around that time period.
Sabrina Online - A webcomic that ran from 1997 to 2016. Not written very well in my opinion, though I do appreciate it for its historic value and for just how frickin long it lasted.
Furry Fandom History playlist - My personal YouTube playlist of convention videos recorded before 2010. Very Anthrocon-heavy as that's what I could mostly find.
FurryMUCK - Text-based multi-user dungeon that started in 1990 and still sees a fair amount of activity to this day. I recommend connecting to this server (and any MU* really) using the BeipMU client.
The Fursuit Archive... Archive? - An absolutely enormous database of convention photos and videos. Seriously, they have tons of pics from almost every year of every con there.
Bluefurry (oekaki) - An oekaki art board hosted on what appears to be a furry's personal webpage. Oekaki, as used in the fandom's earlier years, is an art form characterized by simplistic rendering and somewhat pixelated linework - it's the style that I most associated with oldschool furry before diving into this hobby. (Most of this board is SFW but there's a small amount of very NSFW art here as well)

If you've stumbled upon this post from some time far in the future (greetings, traveler!) and any of the above links don't work, check to see if archive.org has any snapshots of these webpages. You might still be able to harvest some goodies that way.

Thank you for all this, fascinating to go back in time and see it all. <starts flipping through pages like mad> OOoo, just saw "fursuit flips" to techno beat, awesome!!

 

[BassFoxBoog]

I could do that

Thank you for all this, fascinating to go back in time and see it all. <starts flipping through pages like mad> OOoo, just saw "fursuit flips" to techno beat, awesome!!

........ I just don’t wanna

 

[RailRide]

I still have really old stuff on VCL. The site does still get new uploads, though only a few people still post there. I found my account password in September 2019, posted a few pics there and they remained at the top of the new uploads for a few days. I just looked there as of this post, and new uploads have appeared there as of 6/1/2021. I'm considering putting up a few more selections from my gallery here.

Much of my oldest work on FA consists of reposted comics that existed only on personal webspace back in 1999. I was dealing with the constraints of having only the 5mb of server space MindSpring/EarthLink provided with dial-up accounts back then. Still I managed to get about 40 B/W pages up there telling how my OC's discovered this fandom (in a really hack way, but that was 22 years ago), before I joined VCL in 2003, which in turn allowed me to start posting what amounts to the second arc of that comic in color. I didn't repost the early pages back then, instead linking to VCL from the last page I had on my personal site, but the entire collection now resides on FA (in fact I resumed work on that very same comic after an 11-year hiatus--three pages are up now, and four more are in the finishing stages as I type this). My most recent journal post goes into this in greater detail if your interest is piqued.

As for older works, I have a bunch of them from even before I discovered furry fandom. At this point, being here long enough to see a slowly growing number of accounts idled by their owners passing away, I decided to start organizing those drawings and posting them here in the form of "Ancient Art Archive" posts contained within a frame that identifies them as historical artwork (descriptive journal here). I like to think I've gained a smattering of watchers who enjoy digging into the crates, so to speak, and in some cases I have additional context to add to these works (as anyone who has read my long-winded submission descriptions here on FA can attest)

I guess I'm fortunate to have enough reverence for my older works that I still have them around to post. It may stem from my not having to hustle for commission income to make ends meet (I'm extremely grateful for that). From what I've seen, many artists in that position dash out piece after piece with little or no context beyond "Commission for <insert name>", pieces that are effectively forgotten once they're posted, and sometimes deleted in gallery purges (or just plain buried by the way Twitter works by default) out of concern that a potential commissioner may see an older piece and pass on them because they didn't bother to see if said artist had newer, better work. I do occasionally take commissions for the challenge of drawing someone elses characters (half of my 2020 output was comprised of them), so I do understand the concern, hence the idea of formatting my oldest art in the above-described manner.

---PCJ