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

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

#141

Post by Sleeep »

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…

Some good screenshots here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/how-25-popular-websi...

CNN's original online coverage of the OJ Simpson murder trial (1995) is still online and mostly intact - http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/

Welcome to Netscape (94) - http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

It's later than 96 but I don't know who is still paying for hosting for a stadium that was demolished over 16 years ago http://www.3riversstadium.com/index2.html

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

#142

Post by dep_b »

Just yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time, apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that would add it to the top of every page he created like a template.

I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would either break all existing links, take a bit of work to make .htm files execute PHP or to make them forward permanently to their PHP versions. Or I simply could do the only sane thing: loading menu.php on every page within an IFRAME and changing his 15 years old Dreamweaver template.

The internet has been saved! A bit at least!

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

#143

Post by mi100hael »

Frondo wrote: post #130
mi100hael wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

So how much would you pay for a bare-bones, text-only version of the content, if you're going to read JS-decorated content?

Are you suggesting that ads can't appear in text articles? Or that ad blockers don't exist for graphical browsers?

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

#144

Post by Symbiote »

jandrese wrote: post #126
drewg123 wrote: post #55

> [The Rolling Stones] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason.. The MBone was not a "provider", it was an IP multicast network. This was the only way to efficiently stream video content to thousands of simultaneous clients before the advent of CDNs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone

MBone lost its reason to exist when the internet backbone turned out to be much easier to upgrade than the edges. There's not much need to implement a complicated proxy system to save bandwidth on the backbone when almost everybody is constrained by their last mile link. For years I thought TV stations might connect to the MBone to do simulcasts for people on the Internet once broadband became widespread, but the wor…

My internship, in 2006, involved working on an IPTV prototype for Philips. I remember working on a multicast server and the set-top-box client -- the server had a DVB-T card, and rebroadcast all the BBC channels over the LAN. Since the stream was always there, changing channel was extremely fast. DVB broadcasts information packets regularly, containing the TV schedule and so on. These were also forwarded over IP, and then cached by the STB.

It was neat, but presumably most of the multicast stuff was abandoned not long after I left.

Someone else worked on a system to help the user schedule their TV around the broadcast times.

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

#145

Post by wiremine »

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…

Ironically, I think you'll have much better luck looking at web design books from that era, instead of links on the web. I just pitched a bunch of my design books from that area, and they were full of "cutting edge" examples.

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

#146

Post by jacquesm »

orbitur wrote: post #138
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather the opposite, a very large fraction of the original pages have been preserved. Many of them were deleted long before by the owners themselves and/or rehosted elsewhere. Original Geocities content is probably the oldest large body of internet content that will be preserved for many years to come and it will look roughly how it looked on Geocities because it wasn't relying on much of anything other than basic HT…

For whatever reason, my site (Hollywood/Academy/4430) disappeared from Geocities before the mass archival happened. I certainly didn't delete it. I search for it once a year, hope springs eternal.

Ai. I searched a bit for you, as well in the original crawls but to no avail. Most likely there were very few inbound links to that site which meant it wasn't discovered before it got wiped. I was still archiving stuff long after Geocities had officially shut down, for weeks new stuff turned up. 4428 is there, the next one after that is 4460, I suspect that if it had been archived you'd have found it by now.

Have you checked Jason Scott's torrent of all things geocities as well?

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

#147

Post by bahjoite »

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…

A research project presenting pages from Geocities: http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/

Pages from 1996 start 102 pages prior to the last page (at present: http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/page/10743 )

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

#148

Post by kyledrake »

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.

Hi, founder of Neocities.

I get this request a lot actually. The reason I decided to not do it was because webrings, though nice, had a lot of problems. The main issue was that people's sites would go away, and then the ring would break. I also didn't want to introduce any functionality that would make sites depend on Neocities backend APIs to function. Web sites are more long-term and durable if they remain (mostly) static.

I tried using "tags" that could bind sites together on Neocities, but to be honest the idea has largely been a failure. People will tag their site "anime" and their site will have nothing to do with anime... but it's a popular tag so they add it in just so they're on a popular tag. Geocities had this problem to a certain extent too (a tech site being in the non-tech neighborhood). You can get a flavor of the problem here: https://neocities.org/browse?tag=anime

One idea I'm considering is to only allow a site to have one tag, rather than 3 like I do right now. Maybe that will stop people from adding tags that are irrelevant to the content of their site. Or it may compound this problem. I'm on the fence about it.

Another idea I'm considering is allowing people to create curated lists of their favorite sites on Neocities, similar to playlists on Youtube. The "follow site" functionality kindof does this, but in a generic way, and it tends to be a bit... I guess nepotistic (hey you're popular, follow me so my site can get more popular too!)

I'm always happy to hear ideas on how to improve this. I do like the idea of related sites being able to clump together, but in practice it doesn't work as well as I would like it to. But maybe it works well enough and I'm overthinking it.

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

#149

Post by koz1000 »

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…

You could try my site for Pinball Expo 1994.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/

Did it by hand with MS Notepad, MS Paint, Apple QuickTake 100 camera, Chameleon TCP/IP, and Mosaic for PC.

I did, however, drop the webmaster email address about 20 years ago.

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

#150

Post by memracom »

Did you try looking them up at archive.org? I expect that many of them will work there.

The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a historical record,

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