pur­ple.com: a brief eu­logy

On November 2, 2017, I lost a close com­pan­ion. pur­ple.com is no longer the bold-yet-un­der­stated pur­ple eye­sore that I had grown to know and love.

It has been re­placed by pur­ple, a mat­tress com­pany that I keep get­ting ads for on Facebook.

In a to­ken of re­mem­brance, here is the story of my life with pur­ple.com.

I first came across pur­ple.com in the sum­mer of 2015. I had fin­ished my first year of high school, bliss­fully un­aware that school could get much much worse, and I had been to my first hackathon, HackTJ, where I built some­thing in­cred­i­bly bro­ken, but with which I was sat­is­fied nonethe­less. I was hooked on hackathons.

I only men­tion this be­cause I en­coun­tered pur­ple.com at my sec­ond hackathon ever. The in­ter­net was, as it usu­ally does when a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple try to ac­cess it at once, slow and un­re­li­able. I sat with a cou­ple of my friends, an­noyed and im­pa­tient. One of them, who was more ac­quain­tance than friend at the time, let out a cry.

Guys, I have in­ter­net!

I looked at her screen. It was filled with a dis­gust­ing shade of pur­ple.

What the fuck is that.

“It’s pur­ple.com,” she in­formed us. “It’s the fastest load­ing web­page in the world.”

That was a bold claim - one that I’m pretty sure is not true - but I took her word for it, and ever since, pur­ple.com has been a con­stant in my life.

pur­ple.com has been around since August of 1994. That’s over five years be­fore I was born. When I learned about pur­ple.com, it could legally drink al­co­hol. It’s not just a web­site. It’s an in­sti­tu­tion - one that has been re­placed by a mat­tress com­pany.

As I nav­i­gated my way through high school, pur­ple.com has al­ways been there for me.

At every hackathon, when the in­ter­net in­evitably goes awry, the blind­ing pur­ple is the bearer of good news: You can google things now.

Every time I was fran­ti­cally try­ing to con­nect to school WiFi so I could print that pa­per due next pe­riod, that lus­cious #DD00FF was there to re­as­sure me: Everything is okay. Your pa­per is hor­ri­bly writ­ten, but at least you can print it out.

And all of the late nights spent work­ing pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, when I’ve ex­hausted Facebook and Reddit and Youtube, and even my email, my mus­cle mem­ory would turn to pur­ple.com, and the re­ally quite hor­rid pur­ple would is­sue its stern ad­mon­ish­ment: Get back to work.

But sev­eral weeks ago, that all changed.

I was hav­ing net­work con­nec­tiv­ity prob­lems. Unfazed, I opened my browser and nav­i­gated to my home away from home. And I watched the load­ing in­di­ca­tor spin.

That’s okay, the net­work is still bro­ken.

Then Google loaded.

Then Facebook, then Blackboard, then fcps.edu.

And pur­ple.com just sat spin­ning.

I re­fused to lose faith.

It’s an old site, prob­a­bly the server had to be re­placed or some­thing. It’ll be back up soon.

I held on to hope against hope that, the next day, every­thing would be back to nor­mal.

I wanted to be­lieve, but, alas, all good things must come to an end.

Thanks pur­ple.com for all the mem­o­ries. I guess now I’ll just have to go to not­pur­ple.com.