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

Surf the web like it's 1999

billsworld.neocities.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 177 posts

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#61

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #60
kloch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inst…

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!

[deleted]

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#62

Post by bityard »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #51

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.

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

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#63

Post by xxr »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #51

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.

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.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#64

Post by xxr »

wolpoli wrote: post #53
ThinkingGuy wrote: post #51

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.

In terms of load speed, the period between introduction of broadband and the rise of SPA was heaven.

Absolutely--I'd click a link, and it would feel like the page had already been in memory.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#66

Post by fragmede »

devin wrote: post #58
LinuxBender wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm going to take a guess this was FUSE.

FUSE was 2004, so it's anyone's guess.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#67

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

xxr wrote: post #63
ThinkingGuy wrote: post #51

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.

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…

I think this was progressive JPEGs

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/website/improving-websit...

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#69

Post by egeozcan »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #5

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.

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).
Post reply on HN