Wow, great stuff and the site was last updated on my birthday! lol.. Talk about a fun gift from the past.. :-)
Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#12Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total…
It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "
It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…
Oh, i'm 100% sure i complained about slow pages then as well, but otoh a delayed background didn't typically* block all the content.
That said this wasn't really a comment about time to load the page back then, but rather the massive amount of data pulled for exactly the same content now.
There's also things like Gmail, FB, etc that do a lot of things that fundamentally wouldn't be achievable then. But i still think that there's a lot of strictly unnecessary content pulled. Things that are logically needed given the way the code is written, but i feel a bunch is overwritten, and a bunch is for stuff that i don't personally need/want, so why ship that to anyone? ;)
* Ok, ignoring bright yellow text on a white background until the swirly background image comes into existence. I guess the early internet was similar to those old "awful myspace page" competitions :D
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#14This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!" Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.
High Resolution model (~1800 KB)
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "
It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…
The difference is this site has, at the very top, a link embedded in the sentence "Here is an all text version of this page."
So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#16That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast.
One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing page in the long run.
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write "
It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a [1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as p…
Except, the difference is, there's still people on 56K connections today, once their data volume on mobile has run out.
This site loads within of Any modern site? I can wait 2-3 Minutes to even begin to see text.
And thanks to the assholes who want to prevent the "flash of unstyled content" I just see blank white for 2-3 minutes before seeing any actual text.
By now I've written a custom tool and proxy based on Mozilla’s reader mode so I have an app, open the link in it, and it downloads only the extracted text, in markdown.
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#18Too bad it's not running on the original webserver:
Trying 54.230.79.254...
Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: CloudFront
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 551
Connection: close
X-Cache: Error from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ6dusWopHeZOLLWVpHp__EdWDJcdTSufhQ3E8rVveg-3rAku1Gdzg==Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#19Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm more than a decade into my career as a developer :)
Re: Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)
#20Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total…
It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.
Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc.
The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.