The Magic Secrets Basement
While thinking recently about old software and forgotten websites from the 1990s, I remembered something else that has almost completely vanished from the Internet.
A tiny password-protected magic forum called The Magic Secrets Basement.
I believe the URL was:
spiderlink.net/msb
This was before social media, before YouTube tutorials, before the giant online forums where magicians gather to "drink coffee." At the time, the Internet still felt like a collection of hidden rooms.
And this one literally was.
The Magic Secrets Basement was a password-protected forum I ran sometime in the late 1990s using a Perl script from Matt's Script Archive. Back then, that was how many of us built things on the web: finding CGI scripts, modifying them, wiring forms together, and slowly teaching ourselves what the Internet could become. Nothing about it was sophisticated — primitive HTML, CGI, and curiosity.
But somehow, real people found their way there.
Some members were already well known in the magic community. Others would later become well known. At some point, M-U-M magazine even mentioned the site briefly in passing. For a young magician experimenting with both magic and the early web, that felt surreal.
What fascinates me now is how completely it disappeared. I recently went looking for traces of it online and found almost nothing: no screenshots, no archived copies, no preserved discussions, maybe not even a surviving image.
That's the strange thing about the early Internet. People think of today's web as noisy and disposable, but in many ways it's far more permanent than what came before. Huge parts of the old web simply evaporated — especially the private communities, the weird little corners built before anybody thought about digital preservation. Nobody was documenting everything back then, nobody archived login pages, and nobody imagined historians would someday care about tiny CGI forums where magicians discussed side steals and packet tricks.
The Internet felt smaller then — more hidden, more personal. You found places through curiosity instead of algorithms.
And for a brief moment in the late 1990s, somewhere inside that early web, there was a tiny basement where magicians gathered to talk about impossible things.
Then it vanished.
That same era of hand-wired CGI scripts also produced my first book — which is now lost media too.
Magicians have always built hidden rooms — the most famous is a castle in Hollywood where the doors only open if you whisper the right words.
And if huge parts of the web can evaporate in twenty-five years, it's worth asking what would actually survive us.
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