Another comentor said "You'd have enough time to go eat breakfast, mow the lawn, take a shower, and then come back to it being only 58% done." and apart from mowing the lawn it's actually true.
Yes! The first one my eyes landed on was a mod for Quake called the "Killer Quake Patch". KQP was an amalgamation of what felt like 100s of other Quake mods all compiled together into one megapack.
Horribly unbalanced but side splittingly funny when you'd take your friends head off with a the disc from the Xena TV show.
I like to promote FOSS among my colleagues, so at a time we ended up playing a lot of Quake 3 Arena, because of the ioquake3 project. We had such a good fun, and the game just blazes on modern hardware.
Many of my colleagues still use WinRAR, and it grating to me. ZIP is built into Windows for many years now, and 7Zip is very similar to WinRAR if someone likes that kind of interface, or context menu integration.
It’s funny how seeing those two numbers (88x31) together instantly triggered some really deep-rooted memories.
I wish I kept I copy of “Sky’s Obervation Deck”, my crappy little Geocities page about Star Wars (I think…), proudly part of some random web ring, and surely with its share of <blink>.
Oh, top nostalgia from the 1990s/2000s online. These buttons meant a lot to me. I think I said this on some of my old comments, but I learnt programming because I built a very popular website about a topic/fandom that I was very into back then.
There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs.
Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!
Hah, same. Here the topic was Harry Potter. I had learned basic html (no css, using <font color= or imagemaps liberally), and wanted to create a school others could "attend". A copy of other sites. You could do "assignments" and earn your house points etc. But since I only knew html, how you did it was to fill in my form, which then submitted to some cgi tool online and sent me an email. Then I would manually edit my html to reflect new stats, and upload it over ftp.
Luckily I had only like two close friends enrolled at that school!
Ha, my topic was Harry Potter as well! And yes, doing an online interactive Hogwarts was the dream back then (and processing manually cgi forms was the only way we kids were able to do it). Finally almost 20 years later we'll get Hogwarts Legacy...
It’s a tangent, but I remember watching The Matrix when it first came out and in that scene where Smith is looking out the window telling Neo that they choose that current timeframe for the simulation as it was humanity at it’s peak, I thought it was a little ironic as clearly things were just getting exponentially better all the time.
I mean, a lot of things have got better, but we lost a lot along the way too. The web certainly didn’t live up to its early potential (or more accurately, we just tossed it for something way inferior that was less hassle).
I guess really it’s just surprising to look back at that scene and think there’s some truth in it.. especially given that now it’s 2022 and we’re all flying round Mars in our self-driving Jetson cars.
> The web certainly didn’t live up to its early potential
Oh, but it could have been far, far worse. We almost lost the web to Adobe/Macromedia/Flash. And then almost again to activeX.
At least we still have the open, accessible, extensible web standards. Only that the top-layer: the applications and sites built have been embraced by a few monopolies.
I'm rooting for WASM (because of my dislike for JS) but I'm also cautious for one of the FAANG taking wasm and re-trying the old flash/activeX trick again, but now with a "only runs on android" or "requires azure certification" angle via WASM.
What will probably happen is the even older “Best viewed on Google Chrome” gambit. I.e. web sites will technically all be viewable with what are technically open standards, but they will all change so fast, and there will be so many of them, so that the only browser anybody can realistically use is Google Chrome. And if a network can be only accessed with the product from one company, then that company controls that network.
I do. I wrote quite some.
Then dynhtml happened through JS. Nothing like the JS we have today. Loved it.
But both java applets and JS was mostly open. I recall you could open most applets and get the Java code or some form of it, rather easy. But it might simply be that concealment wasn't important back then. Idk.
That's not one of the sample buttons? I was once at a modern "junk art" museum, and came across a light-switch under repair. It took several seconds before I realized it was not an (intentional) exhibit piece.
Old "Under Construction" icons could make a whole category by themselves; I think I've seen at least a hundred of them, some being really creative, just like some 404 pages.
I thought for sure "life" would be over by now but www.netaddress.com still looks like a 1990's website. There's some info about payments so I dunno if it stayed free, but it's crazy that it looks like you can still login if you have an account.
My father still has and uses a juno email account. It bothers me immensely. I know another guy who still has an active aol email too. Lgr did a video where he signed onto the old aol walled gardian browser homepage before it was killed off.
I was online during that era but "88x31" does not ring any bells. Is it significant at all or just some arbitrary size? What about the number of animation frames? 88x31x10?
88x31 in numbers doesn't ring a bell for me either, but seeing those buttons, I remember being them everywhere. Some were more common than others (HTML validated, XHTML validated, Netscape, optimized for 1024x768, Apache, ...).
It's only significant in the sense that so many of them were made to that same size. It was an arbitrary choice for the first button image (Netscape Now?), then everyone else copied the size and format.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that 88x31 was done because Netscape distributed similar buttons for webmasters to include on their webpages if it was optimized for the Netscape browser. Buttons which were arbitrarily 88 pixels by 31 pixels. But then as those buttons propagated, other webmasters started creating other buttons that fit in with the original Netscape buttons; copying the same dimensions and styles.
Then it became an odd ad-hoc standard of that era of the internet, where you'd include 88x31 buttons because it was cool and popular. While others would be advertising their page based on how cool the buttons looked, and making them fit that standard 88x31 buttons so they were more likely to be included.
Exactly my question. It doesn't go cleanly into any of the common widths from the time. Common powers and multiples are way off. My guess is it was an arbitrarily chosen size on free hosting like Geocities, that fit into their default layouts and frames.
Part of what gets me about relics from the Geocities era, apart from the eye-catching and charmingly amateurish maximalist aesthetic, is that personal webpages were a space in a way a Twitter or Facebook profile just can't be. A profile page where you can't change the background, font, font size, font color, sidebar content, overall layout, etc, is to a webpage as a prison cell is to a home.
Still, webpages can't compete with the shareability and "virality" of social media by default; it's what made them popular. The simplicity of use is also a prerequisite; there's millions of people who can't write a line of HTML or CSS, and 99% of them never will. I sometimes daydream about some service that will somehow combine the best of both worlds. Total customization with viral sharability, and without requiring technical skill. Maybe something like that's already been made; maybe we can learn something from why it failed.
I think you're describing MySpace. Anyway isn't it good that it's difficult or expensive to make a pretty website? Otherwise the likes of me can post things that look good, just like government agencies and people who give a shit do.
I'll just tell you to reject pandemic protocols and vote against established politicians and try absurd and dangerous pseudomedical cures.
Isn't it better that me and my ilk have to design our own websites and hence signal our shittiness by having shitty aesthetics?
I miss it too, but the web is much larger and more complex now, despite how it looks from a user pov. With all those customizations and widgets also opens doors to injections and other vulnerabilities that companies simply don't want to worry about. They're too busy competing with other social media platforms that also don't have those vulnerabilities.
a space in a way a Twitter or Facebook profile just can't be
I can't speak for Twitter, but Facebook in its early days was incredibly personalizable. Not to the extent of GeoCities or MySpace, but you could do all kinds of things with your profile page. "Pieces of Flair" was my favorite: http://www.krembo99.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/200707...
Then one day, Facebook went corporate, and all of the customization stuff disappeared. I imagine a lot of small businesses ceased to exist when that happened, because people used to sell different Facebook customizations.
It seems to me that if it was easier for ordinary people to add custom CSS to their browsers, a cottage industry could be made for skinning people's social media feeds.
I don't remember this, so if they indeed binned that pre-2009/10, then FB winning the majority had not even started outside the US, I think. (at least in Germany FB was still kinda growing and not completely widespread when I signed up, we had other stuff).
156 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] thread- launch app
- type in URL
- BAM! Crash!
Using an HTTPS-stripping proxy I tested it on a 1995 Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c with a 33 MHz 68040 CPU running Netscape 2
Here's the video, I got bored after 10 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX1EmE4xFog
Another comentor said "You'd have enough time to go eat breakfast, mow the lawn, take a shower, and then come back to it being only 58% done." and apart from mowing the lawn it's actually true.
Horribly unbalanced but side splittingly funny when you'd take your friends head off with a the disc from the Xena TV show.
I wish I kept I copy of “Sky’s Obervation Deck”, my crappy little Geocities page about Star Wars (I think…), proudly part of some random web ring, and surely with its share of <blink>.
There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs.
Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!
Luckily I had only like two close friends enrolled at that school!
https://web.archive.org/web/20010219045610/http://www.pichus...
A nice blend of nostalgia and triggering, "Get RealPlayer Now!".
You and me both.
It’s a tangent, but I remember watching The Matrix when it first came out and in that scene where Smith is looking out the window telling Neo that they choose that current timeframe for the simulation as it was humanity at it’s peak, I thought it was a little ironic as clearly things were just getting exponentially better all the time.
I mean, a lot of things have got better, but we lost a lot along the way too. The web certainly didn’t live up to its early potential (or more accurately, we just tossed it for something way inferior that was less hassle).
I guess really it’s just surprising to look back at that scene and think there’s some truth in it.. especially given that now it’s 2022 and we’re all flying round Mars in our self-driving Jetson cars.
Oh, but it could have been far, far worse. We almost lost the web to Adobe/Macromedia/Flash. And then almost again to activeX.
At least we still have the open, accessible, extensible web standards. Only that the top-layer: the applications and sites built have been embraced by a few monopolies.
I'm rooting for WASM (because of my dislike for JS) but I'm also cautious for one of the FAANG taking wasm and re-trying the old flash/activeX trick again, but now with a "only runs on android" or "requires azure certification" angle via WASM.
(FireFox stands as a lone exception to this but I get the impression, probably wrongly, that Mozilla is always a couple of dollars from bankruptcy).
But both java applets and JS was mostly open. I recall you could open most applets and get the Java code or some form of it, rather easy. But it might simply be that concealment wasn't important back then. Idk.
I thought for sure "life" would be over by now but www.netaddress.com still looks like a 1990's website. There's some info about payments so I dunno if it stayed free, but it's crazy that it looks like you can still login if you have an account.
From their FAQ. Built to last.
I ... Want to go back guys.
Then it became an odd ad-hoc standard of that era of the internet, where you'd include 88x31 buttons because it was cool and popular. While others would be advertising their page based on how cool the buttons looked, and making them fit that standard 88x31 buttons so they were more likely to be included.
Edit: Oh, someone answered in another thread - appears to be as another person remembered here: https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html
Still, webpages can't compete with the shareability and "virality" of social media by default; it's what made them popular. The simplicity of use is also a prerequisite; there's millions of people who can't write a line of HTML or CSS, and 99% of them never will. I sometimes daydream about some service that will somehow combine the best of both worlds. Total customization with viral sharability, and without requiring technical skill. Maybe something like that's already been made; maybe we can learn something from why it failed.
I'll just tell you to reject pandemic protocols and vote against established politicians and try absurd and dangerous pseudomedical cures.
Isn't it better that me and my ilk have to design our own websites and hence signal our shittiness by having shitty aesthetics?
I can't speak for Twitter, but Facebook in its early days was incredibly personalizable. Not to the extent of GeoCities or MySpace, but you could do all kinds of things with your profile page. "Pieces of Flair" was my favorite: http://www.krembo99.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/200707...
Then one day, Facebook went corporate, and all of the customization stuff disappeared. I imagine a lot of small businesses ceased to exist when that happened, because people used to sell different Facebook customizations.
It seems to me that if it was easier for ordinary people to add custom CSS to their browsers, a cottage industry could be made for skinning people's social media feeds.
[0] maybe with exception of something like Gutenberg in Wordpress.