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Surf the web like it's 1999

billsworld.neocities.org

91–100 of 177 posts

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#91
Veteran of the browser wars here. So many (good) feelings checking this website… I loved that era’s internet.

Incidentally my spotify started playing songs I used to download via Napster so I’m now 100% nostalgic.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#92
post #53

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.

Hear hear

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#93
post #58

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.

More likely to be WebDAV, which was the 'great hope' for cloud storage before it was called cloud.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i love the creativity people come up with for such novel things

Similarly check out https://protoweb.org/about/ . They dont have every site, but they also include a fun 'antique' youtube where you get to stream with Real player or windows media player to bring back the 'greatness' of those products.

i'm excited to see if they properly recreated the "Buffering..."

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#95
post #81
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SPA?

It's what people who didn't understand the separation of concerns with HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and server side were did by deciding to jam it all into JavaScript and entangle it in code complete and gang of four constructs and then call it superior, easy, efficient, well designed, robust ... It's ... It's simply wild.

HTML content? In the javascript. Style information? In the javascript. A way to negotiate network loading and resources, document structure? You guessed it. Want the back button to work again? More JavaScript. URLs to be universal? Even more!

Eventually you'll get the page to be almost as functional as it would have been by default had you not used any of it.

Read the mdn and w3c documentation guys, I promise you 99.9% of what you want is in there without reinventing it from base principles. It's not 2010 anymore

It's like a bad cook who is trying to fix a poorly made meal by making more mistakes, covering it in salt and oil, smearing honey over it, and calling it delicious.

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#99

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).

I've heard the specific old format pronounced 'GIF', whereas the newer general use case for any image format is pronounced 'GIF'

Re: Surf the web like it's 1999

#100
post #3

See also: https://wiby.me , search engine for such websites.

> See also: https://wiby.me, search engine for such websites.

Thanks for reminding me about this! So much of the older information is lost using modern search engines. Even when I use the date range feature, I don't turn up the pages Wiby does.

I had been using Yandex for searching older content but now I've added Wiby (right click inside its search form) to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...

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