In fairness, the hard part is scaling redundant HA phone operators. I'm sure between twilio, deep learning, and GPT3 they have the problem almost solved.
Riiing. Hi, I'd like to order tamale maker TK156.
No problem! Where in Tokelau would you like us to send 156 tamales?
I mean yeah, plain html/css scales well for any site that just exists to serve a couple lines of text and images. I can't think of a single site (outside of maybe craigslist) that can get by with that functionality today.
Newspaper sites are the obvious example you'd think of... but they need comments, advertising (or login functionality), moderation tools, etc.
All of the features you mention can be done without JS using server side rendering.
It would of course be more convenient to use JS for advertisements, but logins and comments used to be implemented without using JS for many pages, even if JS was available.
HN is an example of such a site. This site does not have scaling issues due to login not using JS.
I like this one even better and I think many of you will too. I refuse to close the tab just so I can look at it once in a while. It makes me smile. I might buy some tiny trees and a Hornby Peckett 614.
It maybe used to be a Windows executable (or any other platform using the .exe extension), but it probably isn't these days - but of course they cannot simply move the script to a different place because it would break all existing counters.
You can still occasionally see this on some websites with old infrastructure or infrastructure that has grown over the years. For example if you book a train ticket in Germany through Deutsche Bahn, it will go through bin/query.exe!
Your mention of Deutsche Bahn reminds me of how their first online timetable was some guy's email address, he extracted data from their CD-ROM, and created a service that periodically fetched his e-mails, parsed them (the timetable query had to have a particular syntax), processed the routes, and sent replies to the e-mails.
It ran on a (IIRC) 486 in his student apartment.
I wish I could link you to this story, sadly Google nowadays can give you train timetables, but it no longer cares what words you enter in a search query, it just thinks I'm looking for the schedule information of train services around me.
Having done this back in the day with Apache on Windows NT 4 Server... 'cgi' is a basic stdin/stdout formatting standard that almost any command line utility can be written to accommodate. In this case, the 'count.exe' would be tracking request counts and returning (via stdout) a dynamically built GIF image of the total number of visitors. Crude, but quite popular during the Web 1.0 days. In fact, the code would have been so simple, that count.exe on Windows and 'count' on Linux would have been the same thing.
I take a lot of design inspo from this twitter bot that randomly chooses web archive screengrabs. Indeed, the free video offer seems to be a huge distribution trend circa 1996!
One site I recently stumbled upon from that golden era is the UofM's Geometry Center. Static content still displays. But interactive Java applet support in modern browsers is an issue.
For reference, CERN released the original Web software to the public in April 1993, HTML tables (which feature prominently on this page) entered the standard toward the end of 1995, and the version of HTML this page uses, 4.0 transitional, was published in December 1997. In short, aside from the embedded YouTube video, this looks more like a late '90s website to me.
One of the best parts about growing up in So Cal was the fact that every once in a while there would be a few girls at school who would have coolers with dozens and dozens of hot homemade Tamale's for sale.
Similar to my experience growing up in Houston where it seems everyone has a side hustling abuelita tamale connection.
My parents grew up in suburb of Friendswood and this tamale truck [0] is a local legend. I remember early 80s it was the only thing on this FM road for what seemed like miles in either direction. I think it's 2nd generation owner now but I went by last year and it's still very good.
every now and then there'd be people hawking tamale's at a store plaza's parking lot by our house. In our house we still repeat the phrase we heard from one of the sellers standing in the dark shadows under a tree in that parking lot saying "tamale, tamale, tamale".
Our family tradition is tamales after Christmas. Usually the day after while extended family is still around. We also eat out Tex-Mex on Friday night including day after thanksgiving also while everyone is still gathered. I think it’s not uncommon to have some similar tradition for Texans of all backgrounds.
That Facebook page is wild. I could tell last time I went that the hipster foodies had discovered the place. But those lines are wild. It was never like that as a kid in 80s-90s. Any given drive by there was usually max of 2 cars, most commonly 0. There was no parking lot. Things like this are interesting part about getting old, seeing how change occurs over decades.
We used to buy them from a neighbor every week back in Texas. It was traditional for the older Mexican ladies to get together and make them on the weekends. Making tamales is quite a production, so you have to make a ton in one day and sell them over the week.
I wonder if the company still exists. I'm seriously considering trying to get one. I'd kill for some tamales, but I never make them because it's an insane amount of work.
81 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI assume it must be their massively scalable Kubernetes + NoSQL DB + CDN infrastructure.
Riiing. Hi, I'd like to order tamale maker TK156.
No problem! Where in Tokelau would you like us to send 156 tamales?
Newspaper sites are the obvious example you'd think of... but they need comments, advertising (or login functionality), moderation tools, etc.
It would of course be more convenient to use JS for advertisements, but logins and comments used to be implemented without using JS for many pages, even if JS was available.
HN is an example of such a site. This site does not have scaling issues due to login not using JS.
It's perfect.
> This is the complete video. This is a large file, make sure you have a broadband connection like DSL or Cable.
> This file is too large to download from a dial up connection.
(The file itself is indicated as being 30MB)
Also, this site is on the fastest side of the Internet, despite seemingly calling an exe each time, as per other comments.
https://www.newmodellersshop.co.uk/
Is such a short warranty common in the states?
<img src="http://count.freeyellow.com/cgi-shl/count.exe?df=tamaleking...." alt="**" nosave="" width="100" height="30">
Interesting in that it calls a windows executable. Haven't seen that before, although it of course makes sense in cgi-bin.
Also interesting are the headers returned by Apache:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 13:34:42 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 14792
Connection: keep-alive
Server: Apache/2
Last-Modified: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:02:49 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Etag: "39c8-49b0c90420040"
Expires: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 14:31:11 GMT
Age: 211
You can still occasionally see this on some websites with old infrastructure or infrastructure that has grown over the years. For example if you book a train ticket in Germany through Deutsche Bahn, it will go through bin/query.exe!
It ran on a (IIRC) 486 in his student apartment.
I wish I could link you to this story, sadly Google nowadays can give you train timetables, but it no longer cares what words you enter in a search query, it just thinks I'm looking for the schedule information of train services around me.
I take a lot of design inspo from this twitter bot that randomly chooses web archive screengrabs. Indeed, the free video offer seems to be a huge distribution trend circa 1996!
https://twitter.com/wayback_exe/
One site I recently stumbled upon from that golden era is the UofM's Geometry Center. Static content still displays. But interactive Java applet support in modern browsers is an issue.
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/
For reference, CERN released the original Web software to the public in April 1993, HTML tables (which feature prominently on this page) entered the standard toward the end of 1995, and the version of HTML this page uses, 4.0 transitional, was published in December 1997. In short, aside from the embedded YouTube video, this looks more like a late '90s website to me.
For reference, here is an example of what I would expect an early '90s website to look like: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
But can only get to '96
My parents grew up in suburb of Friendswood and this tamale truck [0] is a local legend. I remember early 80s it was the only thing on this FM road for what seemed like miles in either direction. I think it's 2nd generation owner now but I went by last year and it's still very good.
[0] https://goo.gl/maps/fkMrZPm4S4mHAW68A
Pretty awesome that tamale truck has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hottamales76
That Facebook page is wild. I could tell last time I went that the hipster foodies had discovered the place. But those lines are wild. It was never like that as a kid in 80s-90s. Any given drive by there was usually max of 2 cars, most commonly 0. There was no parking lot. Things like this are interesting part about getting old, seeing how change occurs over decades.
Also you have the Ice Cream or Corn vendors pushing a cart around the neighborhood. I miss SoCal... the traffic sucks but so much else is wonderful.
Very emphatic, not like today's news portal which plays video automatically.
http://www.tamaleking.com/page4.html
I'm glad I get to do it, it is an important part of our communities history and the "stolen kayak spreadsheet" still gets updated...
I wonder what the creator of the HTML is up to these days - Robert Moseley.
2) I want to hug that VCR gif like a long-lost friend.
3) I really want a tamale from this food truck looking gizmo.