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It has been replaced by purple, a mattress company that I keep getting ads for on Facebook.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 It's an institution - one that has been replaced by a mattress company.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.

Web archive of purple.com

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