[HN Gopher] The 88x31 GIF Collection
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The 88x31 GIF Collection
Author : zanchey
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-01-21 10:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cyber.dabamos.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyber.dabamos.de)
| bluedino wrote:
| Such a fun way to show all your alliances. AMD, Netscape, your
| domain provider, your hosting company, a Linux penguin...
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Seeing a thousand of those images on a single page captures the
| '90s internet. All it lacks is the giant throbbing pulsating 'N'
| up in the corner.
| DismantleMars wrote:
| For anyone wondering "Why 88x31?"
|
| Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of websites were
| hosted on Geocities, which was popular as it offered free hosting
| on one condition - you had to embed a small banner into your
| webpage advertising them. The banner image they provided was
| 88x31 pixels, and so many Geocities sites would include other
| external links as 88x31 images so that they matched the
| dimensions of the mandatory Geocities one.
| pluc wrote:
| 468x60 was also a thing for banners back then
| ponytech wrote:
| I was about to ask the question, thanks for the explanation!
| jwilk wrote:
| But why did Geocities use the 88x31 format?
|
| https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31 (link warning: lots
| of 88x31 GIFs!) says it's likely because the "Netscape Now!"
| button was of that size.
| ajbt200128 wrote:
| But why was the Netscape Now button that size? We must go
| deeper
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| It's 88x31 GIFs all the way down.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| As it turns out, if you put two horses side by side...
| vasvir wrote:
| I think the parent refers to that which is a classic one:
| https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-link-between-a-
| hor...
| blep_ wrote:
| At the bottom of the stack, the answer is probably either
| "it fit perfectly in an 88x31 space between some other
| things on the first page it was used on" or "I drew a
| rectangle that looked right and didn't bother rounding the
| numbers".
| CharlesW wrote:
| But why [did GeoCities pick] 88x31? Weren't they matching the
| size of the Netscape web badge?
| DanAtC wrote:
| Here's a search of 88x31 gifs from CDs, disks, and FTP sites on
| archive.org as indexed by discmaster.textfiles.com:
| http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?widthMin=88&heightMin...
| Sembiance wrote:
| If you extend the range by 1px to be 87x30 to 88x32 you double
| the amount of results and get those images that are off by 1px:
| http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?family=image&widthMin...
| kris_wayton wrote:
| Google's image search also supports passing "imagesize:WxH",
| like:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize:88x31&tbm=isch
| stiltzkin10 wrote:
| All those banners would make an epic poster :O
| harryvederci wrote:
| > 1011 requests | 9.3 MB transferred | 9.1 MB resources
|
| I was going to warn about this, but then I realized that's
| probably not even half of the average modern web page size =)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Clearly this was the killer app QUIC needed to solve.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| If they would just update the server to support HTTP2, it
| would be 99% there. Living far away from the server I could
| instantly tell that it was using HTTP/1.1, which was
| confirmed by looking at the dev tools.
| neilv wrote:
| These look small on my setup. They used to be displayed 1:1 with
| low-dpi screen pixels, no scaling.
| lysergia wrote:
| The 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer'[0] GIF triggers severe
| nostalgia.
|
| IE was the dominant browser at the time, and these propaganda
| buttons just reinforced the idea that IE was the only browser you
| should be using. Still see the odd site saying 'Works best in
| Chrome' as if Chrome was the new IE.
|
| Personally though, if your site is one of those annoying SPA
| (Single Page Apps) and doesn't work in Lynx[1], you're doing it
| wrong IMHO.
|
| Nearly tempted to put a button on my sites saying: 'Best viewed
| in Lynx'.
|
| [0] https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/bestviewed.gif
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
| Fnoord wrote:
| The Netscape banners do it for me, as the time when Netscape
| was dominant was a great time for me. The internet was a huge
| vault for me, and every time I dialed in I felt that rush.
| Every minute counted because we paid by the minute.
|
| Netscape is also Mozilla's spiritual father.
|
| Lynx didn't have JS support. Which was a blessing and a curse.
| GalenErso wrote:
| "Only retards use Internet Explorer"
| https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ieretards.gif
| chunkyks wrote:
| Recently enough to have been unacceptable, the director of our
| internal apps team decided to only support IE when they redid
| the intranet site. This, in a place that installs Firefox on
| all endpoints and proxy logs showing less than 50pct IE usage.
|
| He was unamused when I started posting "screenshots" with "best
| viewed in ie" logos added.
| [deleted]
| pachico wrote:
| Don't tell me you wouldn't like the web to be, for a couple of
| hours a day, as it was back then.
| [deleted]
| jwilk wrote:
| Discussed in 2021:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624 (124 comments)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The WinZip 7 and Sexy Brittney Spears ones really take me back!
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| Ugh stop it HN, I can only handle so much nostalgia! FYI, in
| Japan there's a sunset of websites that are meant for a Japanese
| only audience and the pages are still designed in 'ol faithful
| web 1.0 designs.
| whstl wrote:
| That's interesting, I recently had a discussion about how Japan
| has a bit of a tendency to hang on to fashion for much longer,
| but applied to music. Like certain styles of metal being
| popular after decline in the west, 90s Animes with soundtracks
| that sounded like 80s AOR/R&B, or even 80s-pointy-guitars being
| used by Japanese indie bands.
|
| And not in a bad way, but more in a "fashion isn't as fleeting
| in Japan". Also it seems that the new and the old are able to
| coexist in the mainstream there, more than in the West. But
| that's of course just an impression, I might be wrong.
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| You're not wrong at all. It's also out of necessity since
| most development tools and documentation is EN to JP. Its
| hard for them to find answers since everything is either in
| English or outdated.
|
| Regardless, the mentality of ofjit ain't broke don't fix it
| is well engrained in J culture. It's something that I admire
| of the Japanese.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's also: https://gifcities.org/
|
| and I can't help but link to this cozy lil' gem
| https://www.cameronsworld.net/
| reaperducer wrote:
| Big blast of nostalgia from that Japanese pagoda image at the
| top.
|
| It originated as a Commodore 64 320x200 image. Note how there
| are no color changes between 8x8 pixel blocks.
|
| I forget the artist's first name, but I believe his last name
| was Sachs. He was a huge deal in 64 art in the 80's, and later
| transitioned to Amiga.
|
| I think he did a fish tank screen saver, and I seem to recall a
| video game on the 64 where you flew flying saucers to destroy
| Washington, DC. Because he was an artist, the graphics were
| unlike anything else seen at the time on a home computer.
| sedatk wrote:
| Did you mean ZX Spectrum? Because C64 didn't have any trouble
| showing multiple colors in 8x8 blocks.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _C64 didn 't have any trouble showing multiple colors in
| 8x8 blocks._
|
| In high resolution mode it did, which is the 320x200. You
| could only have a single foreground color and a background
| color.
|
| In the low resolution 160x200 mode you could have one
| background color and three foreground colors in a 4x8
| square.
|
| I was a computer artist back then, published in several
| Commodore magazines, and the first thing I had to decide
| when painting a scene was if I could get away with the
| 320x200 mode, or settle for 160x200 because I needed more
| colors closer together.
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(page generated 2023-01-22 23:00 UTC)