If you set your HTTP proxy to "theoldnet.com" with port 1999, and add an exclusion for "web.archive.org", then all your web pages will come from 1999, via the Wayback Machine. You can pick a different year by changing the port. Edit: It may have been hugged to death...
Surf the web like it's 1999
151–160 of 177 posts
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#152You know these kinds of nostalgia capture an aesthetic, but what made the web special in 1999 was the voices of individuals publishing websites of their own… their movable type sites were usually high brow affairs, but ‘99 added LiveJournal and Blogger to the mix. I really miss independent voices. I feel like social media is a hollow version of what was, kind of like a bowling alley with bumpers on the lane. The web…
I have a different take. The opportunities were so wide-open that no one really knew what to do. There's a thing where if you restrict an artist, they're actually more creative. Where was Wordle in 1999?
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#153You know these kinds of nostalgia capture an aesthetic, but what made the web special in 1999 was the voices of individuals publishing websites of their own… their movable type sites were usually high brow affairs, but ‘99 added LiveJournal and Blogger to the mix. I really miss independent voices. I feel like social media is a hollow version of what was, kind of like a bowling alley with bumpers on the lane. The web…
I have a different take. The opportunities were so wide-open that no one really knew what to do. There's a thing where if you restrict an artist, they're actually more creative. Where was Wordle in 1999?
It was called Acrophobia and it was awesome.
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#154Pretty 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…
Interlaced GIFs. Early browsers only rendered the single lines as they came in (leaving the unloaded parts blank), but eventually browsers started doubling the lines so the image seemed to increase in resolution as it loaded. I think MSIE started the latter behavior, and that's what modern browsers do.
Progressive JPEGs are somewhat similar, but IIRC didn't gain traction until 2000 or so.
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#155For probably nostalgic reason, this put a big smile on my face. But for those who are under 30s, or may be under 25s. What do you think of it? Ugly? Interesting? Boring? or what? Interested to know.
You mean under 25. Otherwise the would probably remember win 95 onwards. I somehow like it more, but could be nostalgia of a time when anything a display showed was magical. I wanted more but didn’t know what.
I think these UIs leave some work for the imagination, cartoonish in a way. Now they are too business
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never get over the weird feeling seeing something like Windows 95 which was released with such spectacle, Jay Leno and millions of dollars in launch events, requiring the latest available PC equipment to boot the same day, and of course the looming threat of the SPA sending you to PMITA prison if you didn’t pay your $209.95 being reduced to a small square on my mobile phone still running faster through a million la…
SPA (Software Publishers Association…and RIAA lawsuits…
It's so funny to see the SPA and RIAA being mentioned in the same context as PMITA prison because I just told my friend yesterday that if I ever released the software I actually want to build, that the RIAA and WMG would PMITA in court without so much as spitting on me in disgust before starting.
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#157You know these kinds of nostalgia capture an aesthetic, but what made the web special in 1999 was the voices of individuals publishing websites of their own… their movable type sites were usually high brow affairs, but ‘99 added LiveJournal and Blogger to the mix. I really miss independent voices. I feel like social media is a hollow version of what was, kind of like a bowling alley with bumpers on the lane. The web…
I have a different take. The opportunities were so wide-open that no one really knew what to do. There's a thing where if you restrict an artist, they're actually more creative. Where was Wordle in 1999?
Well for one, we were still using CGI scripts and for two, we didn't have local storage in the browser....
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never get over the weird feeling seeing something like Windows 95 which was released with such spectacle, Jay Leno and millions of dollars in launch events, requiring the latest available PC equipment to boot the same day, and of course the looming threat of the SPA sending you to PMITA prison if you didn’t pay your $209.95 being reduced to a small square on my mobile phone still running faster through a million la…
Unfortunately it’s still Windows 95. Not trying to be a hater, but I did recently install a Windows 95 VM on my Mac to relive that old experience… and then the very first error alert sound, that incredibly tinny really loud annoying sound that would always make me jump out of my chair with crappy PC speakers came blasting out of my much much better speakers backed by a subwoofer and I realized there is no nostalgia v…
Same. It was around that time I discovered Linux, and then the *BSDs. Before that, getting online required Trumpet Winsock. I did some tech support for an ISP up until 1998, so I had to know the stack, but rarely touched it myself. From the mid-2000s I moved to Apple, but only because I wanted a laptop with a unix command line and working bluetooth and that was _hard_ back then.
Just realised that means I've not owned a Windows machine - and barely touched one professionally or even much in my personal life - in almost 25 years now.
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#159Oh man, posting screenshots of your desktop brings me back.
It was waasy more interesting back when actually methods for OS customization existed beyond “favorite color” we’ve really lost so much.
I never had that complicated of a setup but still found it fun
https://www.deviantart.com/donatj/art/Screenshot-9-of-Mine-i...
Re: Surf the web like it's 1999
#160The power off button on the monitor does not work. If I type " http://yahoo.com/ " in the address bar, it does not work as expected. Clicking on the Netscape Navigator logo works, but if I type the same address, "www3.netscape.com" manually into the address bar, it does not work. The URL in the address bar isn't updated.
> The power off button on the monitor does not work.
Seeing that CRT my first urge was to push the degauss button. Not working either.