The Internet Wayback Machine is really a wonderful resource. I’ve been using it to revisit the heady days of the early 2000s, when the best of the best tech nerd websites had joined forces as one seemingly unstoppable force.

Picture the year as maybe 2006, 2007. There were three big tech websites everyone would know about: Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, Sourceforge, a cloud service for code repositories, and ThinkGeek, a retailer for nerdy goods. (They also had Freshmeat, which, before the era of convenient package managers, was something between apt-get and Github.)

Sourceforge is still around, though after some shady doings to try to raise revenue (the way of all web services?) they saw a mass exodus of users for Github. Slashdot is around as well, though Hacker News is probably more popular as a tech news aggregator. ThinkGeek, however, is defunct, having hung on to existence lately as a mere sub-brand of Gamestop before decisively ending as of 2021.

Interestingly, none of these powerhouses were based on the west coast, much less Silicon Valley. Sourceforge and ThinkGeek were started in Virginia, and Slashdot by students at Hope College in Michigan. There was a time before the dominance of California as a tech hub, as perhaps there will also be a time after.

ThinkGeek did not deserve its fate. It really was something special. Back when I was a penniless adolescent, I spent many an hour eyeing its goods and dreaming of someday being able to buy them. Feast your eyes. There’s everything from NASA ant farms to Airzookas to dangerously caffeinated beverages.

Can most of this still be found in some corner of the internet, Amazon or otherwise? Probably. But the fun of ThinkGeek was that they thought it all up and found it all for you. They even had a selection of geek classics for your perusal. Why can’t we have nice things?