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101008
highwaylights
> I miss the old internet
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.
berkes
> 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.
teddyh
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.
ssttoo
Remember also Java Applets?
matsemann
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!
101008
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...
hparadiz
For me it was Pokemon
https://web.archive.org/web/20010219045610/http://www.pichus...
noelrock
Ha, both the original post and the parent comment made me think of Harry Potter - I wonder if I knew either of you! The world is very small.
LanceH
> Oh, top nostalgia from the 1990s/2000s online.
A nice blend of nostalgia and triggering, "Get RealPlayer Now!".
dr_kiszonka
Since you "could talk hours about this," :) do you know what is the story behind the red "Now! writing on many buttons from that era?
LocalH
I feel like that was based off "Netscape Now!" https://sillydog.org/netscape/now.html
marban
Correct
dr_kiszonka
Thanks!
lanbanger
Great site, but is it finished? If not, perhaps it would benefit from a yellow and black flashing "Under Construction" banner.
tabtab
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.
squarefoot
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.
Sharlin
Here you go: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
teddyh
> These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web.
These were not “advertisements” as we now know the term. No, these buttons were mostly put up by users themselves, on their own web pages. Yes, ordinary users used to have their own web pages, mostly without paid advertisements. These buttons, when they linked to commercial products, were unpaid product endorsements.
chrisco255
Affiliate links / ads existed in the 90s. I ran a Nintendo fan site and made like $100 a month on my ads which I was ecstatic about.
teddyh
Note the word “mostly”. The now-normal kind of ads were unusual.
chrisco255
They were not unusual. In the 90s and early 00s, websites were littered with banner ads, popups, and toolbar downloads. They may have been unusual in the very earliest days of the web, but it didn't take long for sites to monetize with ads (was normal by late 90s).
avar
Some of them were advertisements as we know them now.
In particular website authoring tools would add these unprompted as self-advertisement.
That was part of the joke of "made with GNU emacs" or whatever, that you were manually adding the same advertisement the "Made with Microsoft Frontpage" users had foisted on them.
teddyh
Those kind of “self-advertisements” were, first of all, relatively uncommon, so much so that they were annoying and lampooned when they appeared. They were also not what we now normally name “advertisements”. Is “Sent by my iPhone” an advertisement? Strictly speaking, yes, but the word “advertisement”, in normal language (and assuming a web context), means a banner ad or similar. These buttons were not paid banner ads, is all I’m saying.
avar
It wasn't uncommon, most websites made by these popular GUI tools retrained these banners,
You're using some narrow definition of "advertising" that doesn't match common use. You don't need to be paid to be a walking billboard.
When the program you were using inserted these it was analogous to license plate frame advertising today[1]. Consumers don't get paid for those either, but it's advertising for car dealerships.
There was also a culture of voluntarily inserting these, but that doesn't mean some of them weren't product placement or advertising.
1. https://www.zazzle.com/car+advertisement+license+plate+frame...
xxswagmasterxx
Here are even more of them: http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
abracadaniel
General gif search from the geocities dataset is also available. https://gifcities.org/
xhrpost
I was gonna say, there must be a million more of these.
tyingq
You can also coax google image search into finding these with the "imagesize:" search directive.
https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize%3A88x31&tbm=isch&s...
a_shovel
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.
reaperducer
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.
wink
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).
pipeline_peak
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.
timeon
With profiles and even managing CMS portals [0] you are just filling the forms.
[0] maybe with exception of something like Gutenberg in Wordpress.
Y_Y
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?
Aeolun
Money isn’t really a problem if you have billionaires to fight your fight for you.
tumultco
If you're on a retina display, I recommend adding this CSS so it uses nearest-neighbor interpolation for the scaling:
img {
image-rendering: pixelated !important;
}worldofmatthew
I would suggest adding that as a HTML style for each 88x31, rather than making every image on a webpage pixelated.
codazoda
> NET@DDRESS - Free Email for Life
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.
drbeast
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 ... Want to go back guys.
lsh123
I have a Netscape email account which I still use for some old stuff ;)
matsemann
> We support Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+
From their FAQ. Built to last.
fluoridation
Eh. It looks perfectly cromulent to me. I don't think it looks out of place with modern aesthetic sensibilities, just plain.
alex_suzuki
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>.
neurostimulant
Have you checked the wayback machine? Your old site might be preserved by the internet archive.
alex_suzuki
I did, but no luck unfortunately. :-(
replwoacause
I miss these earlier days when the internet was just being born. What a mess we have on our hands now.
thisisjasononhn
A series of tubes!
alphabet9000
what a coincidence, i made 2 88x31 buttons a couple of hours ago
drbeast
Dangerously based. Should start a web 3.0 design trend where we bring this all back and make big tech ux designers cringe.
RadiozRadioz
Another coincidence: I recognized the domain you linked from the license of a Firefox extension I use. Google Images Restored. I just wanted to thank you for creating that extension, I use and appreciate it daily.
alphabet9000
im so glad its been useful, thank you for the kind words :)
codepoet80
May I use your letsnotencrypt button on my retro-friendly website? Where should I link it to?
alphabet9000
yes certainly, this page would be good to link to: http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/lets_not_encrypt.xhtml (not my writing, but i appreciated the sentiment of it)
npteljes
The sentiment is there, but there's just so much wrong in this article, I can't believe it. Beginning with the fact that HTTPS certs DO provide security, exactly in the cases the author dismisses: someone who man-in-the-middles the connection, at any point between the server and the client, can't tamper with the HTTPS connection undetectably. It either requires a compromised server or domain (so you can sign the tampered content), or a compromised client, to accept a tampered content.
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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!