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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

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Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#21

Post by dijit »

ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

I'm only 32, so 1993 was a bit early, from what I remember "the internet" didn't become truly mainstream until 1996~.

Now that I think back the computers "acted" really differently from what we use today.

Things felt much more "immediate" (as in the computer responded to you very quickly) but also much slower; imagine that your keystrokes occurred immediately but opening a window took 50ms.

If the CPU was being hit with any kind of load though, the input would buffer and your keystrokes would stop being presented until the GUI got some CPU time again and all your keystrokes just poured into the active window.

The web itself was a lot of slowly rendering webpages, the sites themselves would actually start loading much quicker than modern sites, and the content would progressively load over some amount of time, there was usually a progress bar at the bottom of the Web Browser.

I know I'm only a few years older than you, but I wonder if you remember all this.

From what I recall the most annoying thing was slowly rendering images.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#22

Post by Ekaros »

ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

Reading articles of time the backbone connections in around that time were also heavily taxed. So you had slow connections, and those we connected also to over congested connections. Not exactly greatest user experience.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#23

Post by pizza234 »

mrblampo wrote: post #10
fuzzy2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

Can you imagine how fast those websites would be today, though, compared to modern websites?

One can easily test this. This is the performance of two semi-randomly picked websites:

- Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms

- Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s

Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher.

The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer.

The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#24

Post by interactivecode »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
fuzzy2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's…

hahaha just no, I remember my crappy hand me down computer was so slow it would chug and struggle to display a nice looking full screen image. You see the old web on your modern lap sized super computer. Go to the thriftstore and pickup a beige windows 95 computer setup and try navigating the web. it was slow, very very slow.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#25

Post by gherkinnn »

ashneer wrote: post #3

I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.

It was fun and wild. In some ways simpler. But it was neither fast nor intuitive.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#26

Post by marginalia_nu »

interactivecode wrote: post #24
marginalia_nu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's…

hahaha just no, I remember my crappy hand me down computer was so slow it would chug and struggle to display a nice looking full screen image. You see the old web on your modern lap sized super computer. Go to the thriftstore and pickup a beige windows 95 computer setup and try navigating the web. it was slow, very very slow.

I was around back then. You don't need to tell me how it was like.

Full screen bing.com-backgrounds weren't really a thing in web design, though. Except in porn, I guess.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#27

Post by Accacin »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #13
cookiengineer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had to wait 30 minutes to wait for all those unicorn gifs to load, so I'd say it wasn't as fast as it could've been :D The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing. Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series charact…

Eh, 30 seconds maybe if it was a lot of images? I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.

I remember waiting like a whole night to download an MP3. When I tried to play it the next day, my laptop was so old and slow that it couldn't play the MP3 without stuttering :D

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#28

Post by [deleted] »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
fuzzy2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster? Not really. Even with ISDN, stuff was slow af. 8000 bytes per second just isn't a lot. Latency was often high as well.

Page loads were slow, but you don't get that weird thing you get today when a page is slow even after it's loaded, or stuff keeps loading in and changing the layout so you need to sit and wait for an unknown period before you can interact with it. It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's…

[deleted]

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#29

Post by blowski »

scandox wrote: post #9

I know this is kind of negative: but I don't like nostalgia much and I think I like tech-nostalgia least. Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was. I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...

Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#30

Post by sph »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #8
trevormcneal wrote: post #6

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css >…

First job title in 2007 was "web master". 15 years later and i feel more like a web dinosaur than a web master. sick of it all.

Computers are still exciting, the web is not. Now the web is just business, advertising and Javascript. It wears a suit, a fancy haircut and deck shoes. It looks like a crypto billionaire.
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