Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 335 posts

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#111

Post by at-fates-hands »

SwellJoe wrote: post #96
davehtaylor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fascinating the change in how we view site navigation. Another commenter gave a link to an old Microsoft site that had links all over the place. But for the most part, it seemed like sites started to standardize on navigation vertically on the left side. Now, we generally see them horizontally on the top, or in hamburger menus. But it's interested how that paradigm shifted. It seems like vertical side na…

With wider monitors, my browser is actually narrowed. I split the screen in half and devote one half to the browser and the other half to a text editor and terminal. I used to have two monitors to do that, but now just one is fine, but the side effect is that I browse in a pretty narrow window. A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.

>> A narrow window also makes reading somewhat nicer on some sites, since it's harder to read very long lines of text.

Curious to know how this works with ad-heavy sites. Do responsive sites display differently then too?

Been flirting with going to a single 32" monitor for a while. Just wondering if you think it's worth it with your experiences since I do development as well and have a similar setup (one monitor for editor and smaller laptop for browser/terminal) and would like to hear your input.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#114

Post by wcummings »

Apocryphon wrote: post #76
CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.

Is this a joke?

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#115

Post by Danihan »

neonnoodle wrote: post #108
dep_b wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure. But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and…

> It lacks animated .gifs for sure Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...

Doesn't count unless it's a spooky skull.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#116

Post by cJ0th »

ChrisSD wrote: post #39

Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…

https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm ;)

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#117

Post by komali2 »

The article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book.

Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel and selling it to the CIC, the for-profit organization that evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress" (Wikipedia).

I always wondered what made that feasible as a sort of profit model, and I guess now I know - that was the state of the internet in 1992, when the book was published. Seems like a way cooler time period for Cyberpunk stuff, I'm almost sad I missed it :(

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#118

Post by mi100hael »

Frondo wrote: post #86
77pt77 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.

I do and I test my personal website on lynx. Doesn't change the fact that sites like this are under the misguided impression that it's cheaper to ship 2 MB of JavaScript with each request rather than just responding with the fucking 2 KB of article text so they end up looking like:

    #                                                                                                                                                     I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked - Motherboard
    #motherboard

    Quantcast

    [p?c1=2&c2=8568956&cv=2.0&cj=1]

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#119

Post by dullgiulio »

ChrisSD wrote: post #73
rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I miss when the web was designed for people who could read.

Then you'll "love" Microsoft's 1994 page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/

"WWW.MICROSOFT.COM is running Microsoft's Windows NT Server 3.5 and EMWAC's HTTPS"

EMWAC supported TLS 1.2 already back then. Amazing!

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#120

Post by addicted »

CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

Is it richer and deeper now?

Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook.

When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.

Post reply on HN