161–170 of 177 posts
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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.
The word "blog" seems like a giveaway this isn't from a real archive. I don't remembering hearing it until years later.
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.
All my contacts online and offline were in ICQ. If anything represents the pre 2k web it's ICQ.
Back then it even displayed your IP address and people could nuke you (DOS today) if you were doing bad things or shit talking.
Also the mentality of people was a lot friendlier and collegial and forgiving for human emotions and craziness.
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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'
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…
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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....
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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…
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...
Yay! My old web page is there :O https://theoldnet.com/get?url=www.shadow.net%2F%7Egiorgio%2F...
Sadly nobody says "surf the web" any more