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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#181

Post by rmc »

talmand wrote: post #164
jianshen wrote: post #46

Damn... I remember learning about yahoo.com for the first time at a Barnes & Nobles when I was actually looking for books about the WWW haha. Two other guys in the same aisle were exchanging bookmarks in person. Anybody else remember writing links down on paper?

Remember when links to individual pages were short enough to memorize without the query string laden beasts we have today?

They weren't short, they were long and had weird characters. You'd have to go to someone's page like http://personal.theisp.net/users/~customername/pg1.htm

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#182

Post by rmc »

jianshen wrote: post #46

Damn... I remember learning about yahoo.com for the first time at a Barnes & Nobles when I was actually looking for books about the WWW haha. Two other guys in the same aisle were exchanging bookmarks in person. Anybody else remember writing links down on paper?

And getting paper books that listed interesting web sites.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#183

Post by jefflinwood »

It didn't include my favorite thing ever, JavaScript widgets!

I wrote a little widget called FigmentSearch, which was about as cheesy as you could imagine for around 1996, it let you search through multiple search engines from one text input, back when there were so many choices (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, YAHOO, etc.)

I was quite proud of myself, as JavaScript was really new. AT&T had a dialup internet service called WorldNet that was basically #2 or #3 in the US after AOL and probably CompuServe, and they licensed the JavaScript to use on their front page. I thought that was pretty neat, since I was a teenager.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#184

Post by return0 »

dalke wrote: post #148
return0 wrote: post #94

We 're kind of lucky to have lived through the internet/web's adolescence. I mean, how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology? For me, it was Jon Udell's column on Byte that first got me interested in web technologies. Great guy. P.S. Am I the only one who wrote all my html in lowercase? (and always used ' instead of " (one keypress less)?)

Radio? Television? Film? Airplanes? Jet airplanes? Diesel locomotives? Skyscrapers? Indoor plumbing? Electricity? Municipal water and treated sewage? Cars instead of horses? The transistor? Telephone? Genome sequencing? Orbital satellites? Transoceanic cables? Fax machine? Camera? TNT? The Haber process for ammonia production? The Hall–Héroult process for aluminum production? Penicillin? The polio vaccine? Actually,…

Some of these happened on short bursts during the 20th century, the centuries before didn't experience life-changing technologies often. Also, things like genome sequencing or the fax haven't changed our day-to-day habits as much as the internet did.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#185

Post by rmc »

dalke wrote: post #148
return0 wrote: post #94

We 're kind of lucky to have lived through the internet/web's adolescence. I mean, how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology? For me, it was Jon Udell's column on Byte that first got me interested in web technologies. Great guy. P.S. Am I the only one who wrote all my html in lowercase? (and always used ' instead of " (one keypress less)?)

Radio? Television? Film? Airplanes? Jet airplanes? Diesel locomotives? Skyscrapers? Indoor plumbing? Electricity? Municipal water and treated sewage? Cars instead of horses? The transistor? Telephone? Genome sequencing? Orbital satellites? Transoceanic cables? Fax machine? Camera? TNT? The Haber process for ammonia production? The Hall–Héroult process for aluminum production? Penicillin? The polio vaccine? Actually,…

That's all in the last ~200 years. Go back 1,200 years. What was happening then

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#186

Post by georgemcbay »

jvuonger wrote: post #176
pvnick wrote: post #11

> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the tag until chapter four? Ah yes, HTML For Dummies . For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my scree…

I'm surprised Tripod.com is still hosting my Pokemon site, Pikachu's Place [1]! I used take screenshots of episodes by taking pictures of the TV using a digital camera and uploaded them to the site. Hilarious. Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics! [1] http://pika299.tripod.com/

Wow, tripod... no pokemon for me (I was a bit too old for that craze), but they are still hosting my site with screenshots for a Quake3 bsp renderer I wrote back then:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/

And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html

Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#187

Post by Geee »

jianshen wrote: post #46

Damn... I remember learning about yahoo.com for the first time at a Barnes & Nobles when I was actually looking for books about the WWW haha. Two other guys in the same aisle were exchanging bookmarks in person. Anybody else remember writing links down on paper?

Yeah, I remember that one kid in school who was 'collecting links'. He wrote them on a notebook and then told other kids about these cool links. Good times :)

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#189

Post by nasalgoat »

HillRat wrote: post #147
tracker1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain. I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, y…

God, I started out with Perl-based CGI, NetObjects Fusion, and ATG Dynamo's early JSP implementation, back when being able to afford a SQL backend meant you were hot stuff. Kids today have it so easy. We had to code ISAPI filters, during packet storms, for bidirectional communication! And don't get me started on what we had to do when the bit buckets ran out of ones....

I wrote an Atari 2600 cartridge auction/trading site in perl that was so popular, it caused my company's webserver - a large national ISP! - to slow to a crawl running all the CGI.

This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#190

Post by drv »

pvnick wrote: post #11

> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the tag until chapter four? Ah yes, HTML For Dummies . For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my scree…

The one that started it for me was HTML 4 for the World Wide Web; the book's website is a quaint look back at an era of frames and tables for layout: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/

My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.

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