[HN Gopher] Surf the web like it's 1999
___________________________________________________________________
Surf the web like it's 1999
Author : throwup238
Score : 276 points
Date : 2024-01-19 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (billsworld.neocities.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (billsworld.neocities.org)
| mysterydip wrote:
| I miss those "under construction" gifs.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Enjoy: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
| throwup238 wrote:
| Sadly it's missing the Dunder Mifflin animation:
| http://ohiogunlawyer.com/
| fsflover wrote:
| See also: https://wiby.me, search engine for such websites.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > See also: https://wiby.me, search engine for such websites.
|
| Thanks for reminding me about this! So much of the older
| information is lost using modern search engines. Even when I
| use the _date range_ feature, I don 't turn up the pages Wiby
| does.
|
| I had been using Yandex for searching older content but now
| I've added Wiby (right click inside its search form) to:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| So realistic. BSOD when I try to open the start menu.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I wish there was a bit more latency. Everything is way to
| smooth!
| cheschire wrote:
| I appreciate the effort to make images load at what feels like
| 56k speeds.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i wonder how many people will actually try to use ctrl-alt-
| delete to recover. i did just to see if it would do anything,
| but i don't use windows so I wasn't going be rick rolled by it.
|
| like it would be funny if it launched a full screen window of
| the start up screen for win98 or something.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| For you younger members of the audience, this page is a great
| demonstration of how animated GIFs were originally used on the
| web and why a lot of us were so surprised when they made a big
| comeback in a totally different style in the 21st century.
| egeozcan wrote:
| I'm also amused by the fact that the file format GIF became a
| name for a snippet of animation, and you usually get a webp
| when you search for a GIF (for good reasons too, but funny
| nevertheless).
| fritzo wrote:
| I've heard the specific old format pronounced 'GIF', whereas
| the newer general use case for any image format is pronounced
| 'GIF'
| rchaud wrote:
| this is exactly how GIFs should have remained. The new
| generation calls these "stickers" which are all over Tiktok and
| Snapchat, and they're all Canva-made identikit garbage.
|
| It's sad to think that GIFs that still remain are movie/TV
| scenes that are clipped to use as reactions to online comments.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Thanks for finally explaining stickers to me.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Laughing hard at the Olean ad. As many won't get that, it's the
| brand name for Olestra, a fat substitute with similar nutritional
| qualities but zero calories because humans can't digest it, that
| was briefly popular in low-calorie foods in the late 90s. But
| since you can't digest it, it leads to horrible shits and was
| mostly taken off the market.
| bregma wrote:
| The official phrase was "causes anal leakage".
| dylan604 wrote:
| that phrase is much much much worse than the black box
| labeling the FDA can require you to use.
|
| once that phrase hit the late night stand up bits, it was
| pretty much over. it's just sad it had to make to that far.
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is pretty fun but it doesn't seem like the URL bar ever
| updates? Even though this are all real pages.
| wiremine wrote:
| It's funny because it's true.
|
| Instantly took me back to the late 90s. I remember trying to
| optimize images for 16k colors, and dealing with all the weird,
| disparate javascript versions.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| 16k colors, man! You must have been rich to be able to afford a
| machine being able to display all of these ;)
|
| I optimized for the official 216 color Web Safe Palette ("How
| many shades of neon green do we really need?") well into the
| early 2000s.
| wiremine wrote:
| 216! Yes! I has totally blocked memories about that. I think
| I built my first website in 1997, and it was wild what we had
| to do back then.
| exitb wrote:
| Using the correct, non-antialiased fonts would go a long way.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| CRTs did a lot of heavy lifting in anti-aliasing those fonts.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| If you set your HTTP proxy to "theoldnet.com" with port 1999, and
| add an exclusion for "web.archive.org", then all your web pages
| will come from 1999, via the Wayback Machine.
|
| You can pick a different year by changing the port.
|
| Edit: It may have been hugged to death...
| dylan604 wrote:
| i love the creativity people come up with for such novel things
| quaffapint wrote:
| Similarly check out https://protoweb.org/about/. They dont
| have every site, but they also include a fun 'antique'
| youtube where you get to stream with Real player or windows
| media player to bring back the 'greatness' of those products.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i'm excited to see if they properly recreated the
| "Buffering..."
| brassattax wrote:
| I like https://oldweb.today ... actually emulates old
| OS/browser combinations and proxies stuff from archive.org
| al_borland wrote:
| This really captures how slow the web, and everything else,
| was back then.
| Gud wrote:
| Not necessarily. I was living in Stockholm and had a
| 10/10Mbit connection. Not too bad for a 15 year old kid.
| epcoa wrote:
| I never get over the weird feeling seeing something like
| Windows 95 which was released with such spectacle, Jay Leno
| and millions of dollars in launch events, requiring the
| latest available PC equipment to boot the same day, and of
| course the looming threat of the SPA sending you to PMITA
| prison if you didn't pay your $209.95 being reduced to a
| small square on my mobile phone still running faster through
| a million layers of framework. Seemed like serious shit at
| the time.
| willcipriano wrote:
| In a few decades or so I could see setting that up for a
| nursing home so the residents could relive their youth.
|
| Might also be good for a young kids pc.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Useful for dementia patients.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Does his proxy send x-forwarded-for header
| jart wrote:
| See also https://olduse.net/ for a 40 year delay on USENET. All
| I had to do was put this in my ~/.emacs file:
| (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "olduse.net" (nntp-port-number
| 11940)))
|
| Then I typed `M-x gnus` and used the `^` key to see a listing
| of newsgroups.
| quartz wrote:
| Oh how that Soundblaster midi vibe takes me back.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Is it just me or is the address bar never updating even though
| the site changes?
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| The power off button on the monitor does not work.
|
| If I type "http://yahoo.com/" in the address bar, it does not
| work as expected.
|
| Clicking on the Netscape Navigator logo works, but if I type the
| same address, "www3.netscape.com" manually into the address bar,
| it does not work.
|
| The URL in the address bar isn't updated.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I love the idea and look forward to diving in. There's an
| anachronism in the first paragraph though... "check out my
| MySpace page"? MySpace didn't launch until 2003... Honest
| question, was this created by someone who was not actually on the
| web in 1999? Or maybe they're just taking artistic license with
| the "1999" idea?
| extr0pian wrote:
| Looking at his neocities (self made) profile, he's 45-50.
|
| https://billsworld.neocities.org/profile/
| xxr wrote:
| And Tomoyasu Hotei didn't release "Battle Without Honor or
| Humanity" (the autoplaying MIDI) until 2000 ;)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Was going to say that Friendster is not as cool, but only just
| realized it came out the same year as MySpace did... whoa
| dexwiz wrote:
| The favorites also has a Dr Who page that features David
| Tennent and Freema Agyeman, who didn't appear on the show until
| 2006.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah except it's known that they can travel through time and
| space, so that one makes sense.
| frognumber wrote:
| 99% odds artistic license.
|
| 1% odds anything else.
|
| It's better that way. The feel of 1999 was there in 1998 and
| yes, the distant future, the year 2000.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| For what it's worth, MySpace _prior to officially being a
| social media site_ was created in '96 and officially launched
| as a internet network drive around 1999 _cant remember the
| exact date_ , then was later sold to Murdoch and evolved more
| into a social media site later on but was already unofficially
| used as one. People shared music, short movies, porn. It didn't
| scale well as there was no de-duplication, files were stored in
| an EBCDIC database on a couple HP Surestore's which I _and
| others_ upgraded a few times from 9TB to 18TB comprised of 4
| and 9 GB drives, then eventually 18 GB drives.
| swozey wrote:
| Was this just like s/ftp accounts? Or something more complex
| like a 1996 dropbox? It was a mounted filesystem in your
| machine?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| It was a drive letter mounted on your Windows machine or a
| mount point on Linux. I forgot what protocol was used and I
| never personally used it as I had my own SFTP servers. On
| Windows people would run an app but I think it was just
| mounting a SMB drive. I only handled the backend storage,
| HP-UX servers and DNS for them. Other people managed the
| Windows servers and their company managed the applications.
| swozey wrote:
| Neat. I was 10 back then but I remember having to deal
| with IPX networking to play Warcraft 1-2 with my dad, and
| over Mplayer, or some sort of online game service IIRC.
| Never really thought about how you'd do a mounted network
| share back then. IPX was a pain but we had no idea what
| we were doing back then.
|
| edit: Oh duh, battlenet.. sigh, my how blizzard has
| changed.
| devin wrote:
| I'm going to take a guess this was FUSE.
| fragmede wrote:
| FUSE was 2004, so it's anyone's guess.
| NikkiA wrote:
| More likely to be WebDAV, which was the 'great hope' for
| cloud storage before it was called cloud.
| broast wrote:
| That was XDrive. I don't think the name MySpace came around
| till the social network in 2003. The sale to Murdoch was
| 2005.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| It was definitely Myspace in 1996+. Perhaps they didn't
| start marketing the brand until 1999? I had to register
| about 50 variants of that domain name in 99' for them using
| the all so much fun email template with Internic. As to
| what relationships they had with other companies I have no
| clue. The HP SureStore's left the dataceter in 2002 or
| 2003. I met their CEO in 1999 when they were going to
| launch the drive space feature. As a fun side note they
| were the only customer I was ever allowed to let into the
| datacenter.
|
| Some of the domain variants were MyLinuxSpace, MyBSDSpace,
| MyWindowsSpace and so on...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, also everything loads too fast. And maybe too many colors
| (too high a bit-depth).
| Clamchop wrote:
| By 1999, most would have been on 24-bit color, or "millions
| of colors" as Apple called it. Most images are still 24-bit
| today.
| sylware wrote:
| Once you get that html table as layout are not harmful, that you
| use properly the border enabling attribute, augment the
| noscript/basic (x)html with <audio> and <video>.
|
| Well...
| irrational wrote:
| I already surfed the web (and built websites) in all of 1999. Not
| even misplaced nostalgia would make me want to go back and surf
| the web like 1999 again. I'll keep my modern browser, CSS Grid,
| and 1 Gigabit Fiber Optic line thank you very much.
| switchbak wrote:
| Surf the web like it's 1999. And all the images load instantly.
| Yeah, that wasn't what it was like!
|
| And altavista.com doesn't even load!
| nrb wrote:
| What makes the nostalgia misplaced?
| irrational wrote:
| Nostalgia is for good things. I surfed the web for the
| entirety of 1999. It wasn't good.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I'm not convinced that it is much better in this decade:
|
| - paywalls & 'login to see more'
|
| - autoplaying videos that follow you whn you're just trying
| to read an article
|
| - cookie banners
|
| - artificial loading throbbers
|
| - horrible intrusive tracking
|
| - an advertising corporation also has the near-monopoly on
| browsing
|
| - we have more bandwidth but apparently need 5Mb of
| javascript just to render text
|
| - mobile first design, meaning much lower information
| density
|
| - walled gardens like discord, facesbook, twitter, reddit
| storing content in inaccessible, unarchivable form
|
| There were problems then but there were fewer headaches and
| fewer exhausting battles just to stay sane.
| pattle wrote:
| See also https://simulator.money/play for a Windows XP nostalgia
| trip
| vdaea wrote:
| That game seems cool, but it's a bit buggy and unfinished. Are
| there any similar games (as in personal finances simulation)
| that are more complete and stable? Obviously the game does not
| need to simulate a Windows XP computer ;)
| jesterswilde wrote:
| Oh snap, I forgot about Tom. Good to see he's still 30 and
| hanging out in Santa Monica.
| ksec wrote:
| For probably nostalgic reason, this put a big smile on my face.
|
| But for those who are under 30s, or may be under 25s. What do you
| think of it? Ugly? Interesting? Boring? or what? Interested to
| know.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 1999? I was ready to get off the web in 1999. How about surfing
| the web like it's 1994!
| kloch wrote:
| I agree, Mosaic was groundbreaking but when Netscape 0.9
| launched in the fall of 1994 was like waking up in another
| century.
|
| Or we could go back to 1991 with IRC, Archie+FTP, and Telnet
| BBS's on Wyse terminals or SparcStations. I'm very nostalgic
| for that era.
|
| IMO Netscape 3.04g was the peak browser experience - and by far
| peak performance.
|
| I remember when a friend who ran a business out of his basement
| got a T1 installed in 1997. Myself and several other friends
| were there the day Verizon hooked up the local loop. I did the
| first test on a desktop windows95 machine with Netscape 3. I
| typed "cnn.com", hit enter and BAM! the entire page loaded and
| rendered _instantly_ before you could blink an eye. I fell out
| of my chair. On dialup it would take about almost a minute to
| download all the images.
|
| Once Netscape 4 hit it was a slow downhill path of bloat. I
| have not been able to replicate that instant rendering
| experience since then.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My nostalgia is mostly for the Bitnet chatrooms from the
| mid-80s. Especially the "hot tub channel". I didn't know it
| was possible to be that lascivious in plain text!
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Wyse terminals! I had my first programming courses at
| university in those. I remember dumping core and somehow
| sending the core file to a classmate's screen, and they had
| to stare at the screen beeping for a while.
|
| Now I teach those courses at the same university. Those
| terminals are long gone. This week we had a coding exam and
| students were coding with their laptops. They are forbidden
| from checking the Internet, sharing folders, and using AI
| assistance, but I'm sure some of them did because it's
| impossible to watch their every move. The exam would be
| fairer if we still had the Wyse terminals!
| imiric wrote:
| Must've been fun browsing all 2,278 web sites[1] on Mosaic 2.x.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
| dexwiz wrote:
| Might as well listen to music like its 1999 likes you are at it.
|
| https://webamp.org/
|
| It really whips the llama's @$$!
| i8comments wrote:
| The website is wellmade and cool and stuff, but I am a bit tired
| of these all-quirky-in-the-same-way retro 1990s geocities
| homages...
| hinkley wrote:
| Nostalgia comes from forgetting that we got tired of these all-
| quirky-in-the-same-way retro 1990s geocities homages in the
| 1990's.
| swozey wrote:
| I've never been able to find my old geocities account. I'm pretty
| sure I remember the neighborhood/number correctly.
|
| It was an ultima online and final fantasy 7 cheats webpage haha
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Pretty accurate, except for one major thing: all the pages load
| instantly. In 1999 you pretty much expected each web page to take
| at least 10 seconds to load, mostly for the images to
| gradually...fade...into.....view.
| wolpoli wrote:
| In terms of load speed, the period between introduction of
| broadband and the rise of SPA was heaven.
| xxr wrote:
| Absolutely--I'd click a link, and it would feel like the page
| had already been in memory.
| wscott wrote:
| SPA?
| highwaylights wrote:
| Single Page Applications. The spaghetti mess of JavaScript-
| heavy monstrosities that replaced the web.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Single-page application. SPAs became popular once JS had
| matured enough to generate all the HTML for the page.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's what people who didn't understand the separation of
| concerns with HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server side
| were did by deciding to jam it all into JavaScript and
| entangle it in code complete and gang of four constructs
| and then call it superior, easy, efficient, well designed,
| robust ... It's ... It's simply wild.
|
| HTML content? In the javascript. Style information? In the
| javascript. A way to negotiate network loading and
| resources, document structure? You guessed it. Want the
| back button to work again? More JavaScript. URLs to be
| universal? Even more!
|
| Eventually you'll get the page to be almost as functional
| as it would have been by default had you not used any of
| it.
|
| Read the mdn and w3c documentation guys, I promise you
| 99.9% of what you want is in there without reinventing it
| from base principles. It's not 2010 anymore
|
| It's like a bad cook who is trying to fix a poorly made
| meal by making more mistakes, covering it in salt and oil,
| smearing honey over it, and calling it delicious.
| dkga wrote:
| Hear hear
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I first used the net at work in the mid 90s, where we had a T1
| and pages were light by modern standards. It was peppy with a
| Mac IIci.
| bityard wrote:
| Quite a while ago, someone (jwz?) brought back the original
| Netscape home page circa 1994, complete with dialup-level speed
| throttling. It "feels" like 56K to me, but I believe 9600-14.4K
| would have been more common at the time.
|
| http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
| xxr wrote:
| I remember a very specific rastering effect with loading
| images, probably around 1994-1996? The image would load every
| nth line and then iteratively nth line + i until i==n. Compared
| to what I would see later (just loading in every line from top
| to bottom), you could get a sense of the whole image sooner,
| just in an increasing fraction of the vertical resolution. I
| can't recall which image type this was or whether it was Mosaic
| or Navigator, but the effect was very distinct; at the time I
| assumed it was the way the image data was streamed in, but now
| I'm wondering whether it was just the way the image codec built
| the viewable bitmap.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I think this was progressive JPEGs
|
| https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/website/improving-
| websit...
| raphman wrote:
| Nice demo: https://pooyak.com/p/progjpeg/
| hinkley wrote:
| Progressive PNGs added a 2d variant of this, but almost
| nobody ever used it, because it made the image take longer to
| load.
| shiomiru wrote:
| GIF supports this too:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing
| zczc wrote:
| That was interlaced GIF, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Interlacing (the demo image
| in the article is from Chrome which tries to approximate the
| image with rectangular regions, the 1990s browsers showed not
| yet received lines as blank which made interlacing effect)
| samch wrote:
| For me, the "https" in the Netscape URL is sort of an
| anachronism. I mean, yes, technically it was available in
| Netscape in 1999, but very few sites used it (even among
| e-commerce sites).
|
| I remember the first ProLiant server we flipped to support SSL
| had to have an add-in card to accelerate the encryption based
| on the traffic we handled. It was something like this:
| https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04283920.PDF?jumpid=in_pb-psn...
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| I'm thought the Netscape logo only animated when the page was
| loading? I found myself instinctively hitting the stop button
| to try and make the logo stop looping.
|
| Overall, it's really great though. I love the stuff popping up
| on Neocities.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Doesn't have a modem/ethernet icon in the tray to
| connect/disconnect and see traffic? I always looked for the
| blinking... and only now realized that I haven't had that for
| years. When did that go out of style?
| ess3 wrote:
| Very nice! The first brief I give my students when teaching web
| development is similar - Web design like it's 1999
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Missed a detail! It should be an IE4 (or so) window half obscured
| by a stack of junk "toolbars".
| d1m wrote:
| First of all, A BIG THANKS TO YOU MAN! this thing blew mind and I
| discovered a new site. This is like unlocking a new map for me.
| luizsantana wrote:
| This brings so much nostalgia and joy
| dakna wrote:
| Friends don't let friends use anything but web safe colors.
| Everyone else can enjoy dithering on their 8-bit CRT
| system2 wrote:
| In 1999 websites were a little more modern compared to the early
| 90s. By 2000 there were many online gaming communities already.
| The BSOD is so realistic though :D
| rchaud wrote:
| GeoCities/Angelfire sites looked like this at least until 2004
| when blogs took off. As CMS architecture was a lot more
| complicated than static HTML/CSS, people stopped customizing
| their sites and just went with default themes.
|
| That was the magic of early Internet. No themes, no frameworks,
| just whatever you could do with HTML.
| ape4 wrote:
| Sadly nobody says "surf the web" any more
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Nor the "world wide web", ask the younger ones what www stands
| for and they get really confused.
|
| If you notice nowadays all websites use just https:// rather
| than https://www.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's also been quite some time since I've heard anyone talking
| about the "information superhighway".
| rchaud wrote:
| That was a Microsoft term, Bill Gates wrote a book about it
| in 1994, and then wrote a second edition a year later
| replacing the phrase with "internet".
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Related: https://www.my90stv.com/
|
| Watch TV from the 90s.
| rchaud wrote:
| I love this site. It is using YouTube embeds, but it doesn't
| show any ads, which would ruin the retro experience. I wonder
| if that's just my adblocker though.
| dataangel wrote:
| The word "blog" seems like a giveaway this isn't from a real
| archive. I don't remembering hearing it until years later.
| al_borland wrote:
| Apparently the term 'blog' was coined in 1999, and Blogger was
| launched later that same year, so it actually is possible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History
| edpichler wrote:
| It was so much better.
| pknerd wrote:
| No JS framework, no NPM, no AJAX, and so on. The web was so
| simple, and so was life.
| hinkley wrote:
| No boats, no lights, no motorcars. Not a single luxury.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| No humans, just trees and dinosaurs. That's the life I want
| now.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| We aint so quaint, we're just technologically impaired!
| rchaud wrote:
| The earliest DRM I can remember are those sites that blocked
| you from selecting text or right-clicking.
| dkga wrote:
| Veteran of the browser wars here. So many (good) feelings
| checking this website... I loved that era's internet.
|
| Incidentally my spotify started playing songs I used to download
| via Napster so I'm now 100% nostalgic.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Pretty authentic. I love the blue links in black background -
| today a accessibility nightmare.
| lcof wrote:
| This feels like a madeleine de Proust: simpler times, so much
| left to discover. We ruined it
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I miss the optimism of that era. I don't miss the weekly family
| beatings though.
| itronitron wrote:
| I haven't been able to find the " p " symbol. Has anyone else
| spotted it?
| miohtama wrote:
| My mobile screen has way higher resolution than 15" monitor from
| 1999. I can fit multiple Netscape's on my screen.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Websites were so easy to read and navigate back then.
|
| It just worked. Some of the websites might be a bit rock and roll
| but there is a strange clarity to the whole thing.
|
| I actually found https://www.seat61.com/ recently and it is this
| one dude who runs the greatest train website on the planet and he
| has been doing it since 2001. Site looks ancient but it is so
| useful.
| Levitz wrote:
| Nothing but desktop computers were intended to display these,
| and so they could take advantage of the screen width. No desire
| to have them be an app either.
| dakial1 wrote:
| That Cyber-bear looks familiar...
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(page generated 2024-01-19 23:00 UTC)