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Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#151

Post by DonHopkins »

pimlottc wrote: post #103

I expected the part about buttons to talk about mouseovers. That was wizardry back in the day, making 3D-shaded buttons that animated as when the cursor was over them, and then changing color or something when you clicked. Impressed the hell out of people.

I gave crazy demos of embedded graphical links with cut-out pop-up targets and pie menus to Bill Joy and Steve Jobs in October 1988. They each had very different reactions!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109221

DonHopkins on May 19, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...

>Here’s a demo of HyperTIES with pop-out embedded menus:

>HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing: Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

>A funny story about the demo that has the photo of the three Sun founders whose heads puff up when you point at them:

>When you point at a head, it would swell up, and you pressed the button, it would shrink back down again until you released the button again.

>HyperTIES had a feature that you could click or press and hold on the page background, and it would blink or highlight ALL of the links on the page, either by inverting the brightness of text buttons, or by popping up all the cookie-cut-out picture targets (we called them “embedded menus”) at the same time, which could be quite dramatic with the three Sun founders!

>Kind of like what they call “Big Head Mode” these days! https://www.giantbomb.com/big-head-mode/3015-403/

>I had a Sun workstation set up on the show floor at Educom in October 1988, and I was giving a rotating demo of NeWS, pie menus, Emacs, and HyperTIES to anyone who happened to walk by. (That was when Steve Jobs came by, saw the demo, and jumped up and down shouting “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat. That sucks!”)

>The best part of the demo was when I demonstrated popping up all the heads of the Sun founders at once, by holding the optical mouse up to my mouth, and blowing and sucking into the mouse while secretly pressing and releasing the button, so it looked like I was inflating their heads!

>One other weird guy hung around through a couple demos, and by the time I got back around to the Emacs demo, he finally said “Hey, I used to use Emacs on ITS!” I said “Wow cool! So did I! What’s was your user name?” and he said “WNJ”.

>It turns out that I had been giving an Emacs demo to Bill Joy all that time, then popping his head up and down by blowing and sucking into a Sun optical mouse, without even recognizing him, because he had shaved his beard!

>He really blindsided me with that comment about using Emacs, because I always thought he was more if a vi guy. ;)

Here's a paper about HyperTIES and its embedded text and graphical menus, pie menus, and emacs authoring tool, that we made in the late 80's at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#153

Post by hallway_monitor »

lanstin wrote: post #146
jrochkind1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find it works even if they can't actually show you any code , because it's proprietary belong to other employers?

Yes. If people talk enough they can’t help but share all the relevant details if you know enough about creating medium or large sized systems. Also I ask questions for stories about troubleshooting bugs, and when to log, some story when logs And I would rather hire someone that iterates well over the weeks or months time frame than can solve something quickly. For newbies, it’s harder.

100% this. All you really have to do is get people talking. Have them tell you a story and ask for details. If they have trouble when you get into details then they are making it up. If not you should have a fun conversation.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#154

Post by le-mark »

For everyone curious about DHTML, IE5 plus had this “dhtml behaviors” stuff that let one implement reusable components of markup and js. It was actually pretty cool at the time. I worked on a project upgrading an IE7 spa in 2016, from behaviors to angular.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#155

Post by djxfade »

ameen wrote: post #138

A lot of old 90's "hacks" are still commonplace in current email design. Thanks to Outlook's reliance on a brain dead MS Word-based rendering system rather than using actual modern HTML5. And since Outlook is still the standard for email clients in the workplace, all other systems are impacted as well. It's interesting to see modern day developers struggle with email design and turn to folks like us :D

Ironically Gmail's web based email client also renders the HTML bad. I guess they emulate what Outlook is doing.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#156

Post by deepsand »

Ah this brings back memories, and so do many of the anecdotes in this thread.

I remember trying these tricks for my Pokémon site hosted on Angelfire. Great fun as a 10 year old, I even started making my own animated gifs.

The page is still up, with this being the latest announcement: I still need a JAVA person and desperately need more webmasters!!! So if you wan't to help me e-mail

Crypto Twitter is very bullish on Web3 being the resurgence of this type of mentality. Fun and accessible technology that has the potential to mature into something powerful. I can’t help but agree.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#157

Post by agumonkey »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #120

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like: Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site Owner: You wrote this? Me: Yeah. Owner: This is in Perl? Me: Yeah. So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use…

the most difficult people are the less knowledgeable it seems

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#159

Post by monocasa »

pjmlp wrote: post #150
lanstin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shockingly low percentage of people have built something they are proud to talk about. All them were good hires tho, as long as the explanations are detailed enough that it was work they actually did or adopted well enough.

Even the stuff we are proud of isn't possible to talk about due to NDAs.

If you put a little work in, you can talk about nearly every project. Even stuff like classified satellites have been discussed; you just act respectful to the interviewee's boundaries (which you should be doing anyway).
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