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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#341

Post by computerslol »

malbs wrote: post #238
computerslol wrote: post #236

This post makes me happy :).   and 0.gif (fewer characters!) bring back memories. What I miss most was the hacky tricks you'd have to put together to get load times down on dialup. Carefully controlling the order in which things rendered. Early DHTML. Slicing layouts so that as much as humanly possible the images repeated. Tables tables tables. IFrames that talked to each other. The javascript that converted s t…

Keeping load times down on dialup. last month I hit my usage cap and was capped to 256k downstream. 256k. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING SIX! FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN DIALUP! I thought that's fine I can cope. The internet is highly broken at 256k. Pages basically don't ever completely load. You end up having to cancel. You end up turning off images, turning off javascript. I can't imagine what the web is like at 56k now…

That sucks dude :(. Yeah, people like you are overlooked. You should call customer support for the sites you use most often and complain. Low bandwidth users are a forgotten demographic.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#342

Post by computerslol »

malbs wrote: post #238
computerslol wrote: post #236

This post makes me happy :).   and 0.gif (fewer characters!) bring back memories. What I miss most was the hacky tricks you'd have to put together to get load times down on dialup. Carefully controlling the order in which things rendered. Early DHTML. Slicing layouts so that as much as humanly possible the images repeated. Tables tables tables. IFrames that talked to each other. The javascript that converted s t…

Keeping load times down on dialup. last month I hit my usage cap and was capped to 256k downstream. 256k. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING SIX! FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN DIALUP! I thought that's fine I can cope. The internet is highly broken at 256k. Pages basically don't ever completely load. You end up having to cancel. You end up turning off images, turning off javascript. I can't imagine what the web is like at 56k now…

I'm sorry dude :(. You are part of a forgotten demographic.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#343

Post by err4nt »

p4bl0 wrote: post #43

Oh, middle school souvenirs… 88x31 :-D I think it misses the fact that JavaScript was mostly used for stuff like rollovers on images back then. Oh, and customized scrollbars in IE! Haha! This post is such much fun I can't stop smiling! Thanks for sharing!

preloaders for your gallery :)

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#344

Post by cine »

This list is amazing. On a related note, I only found out last year that the ever-mysterious "CGI Scripting" I remembered doing in my youth was actually just Perl the whole time.

I had guestbooks in CGI, tagboards in CGI. And you guys remember Greymatter, right?

How about b2?

I still hold a grudge against Wordpress for over-complicating what was a simple, bare-bones blogging software.

Ahhh, the 90s and early 2000s was a great time for the web.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#345

Post by pauljonas »

IN some ways, I miss those days.

I was already in my 30s and a mainframe programmer back in 97 and jumped into teaching myself Unix and Perl. But also dabbling in VBScript and then later Javascript to write a Age of Empires battle calculator that got decent traffic. And a site dedicated to the computer game, with a Perl forum a cobbled and altered "Matt's WWW Scripts" beauty :) Next, around 99, I discovered PHP (when it was still v3) and built what later peopled termed a blog and CMS. I used it to build another gaming site and a fan site for a radio show that became the "official" site for the program. Later I built upon that custom PHP CMS to make a local news site that got heavy traffic for that age (early 2000s) but later sold my interest in the site (and it went defunct not even a year later).

On my original PHP CMS, I recall first using CSS book by Håkon Wium Lie & Bert Bos, original CSS developers, published back in 97 or 98, to try to go it full CSS back in 2000. It sort of worked, but was brittle. This was a few years before the CSS Zen Garden and advancing browsers quickly dispensed with the old tarted up "table" HTML.

But again, for all the great technological strides made, I miss that age -- it seemed we are all "swimming in one pool" -- and all doing our own thing, building and taming unchartered wilderness. Now, building a website for a "clever idea" seems pointless as everyone's online attention is on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest. Even Wordpress blogs seem to be getting passe. In that time, though, there was an energy and vibrancy on building things. Today it seems all the creative programming chops are directed at building silly social media mobile apps that are not much more than ICQ that can do multimedia.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#349

Post by malbs »

Cacti wrote: post #306
malbs wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping load times down on dialup. last month I hit my usage cap and was capped to 256k downstream. 256k. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING SIX! FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN DIALUP! I thought that's fine I can cope. The internet is highly broken at 256k. Pages basically don't ever completely load. You end up having to cancel. You end up turning off images, turning off javascript. I can't imagine what the web is like at 56k now…

Pretty much. About 5 years ago I brought my work laptop on vacation where there was only a phone line. No sweat, my laptop still had a 56k modem, and I started on a 1200 baud modem back in the day, so I was willing to be patient, or so I thought. Once I connected it took almost 2 hours just to start Outlook.

haha, yeah, same I started out on BBS's with a 1200 baud modem and that required serious patience (better than my grand father who had a 300 bps acoustic coupler). We moved interstate and I had no ADSL for a week. I set up a modem, and it had been _years_ since I used one. I forgot you had to enable error correction in the init string (modem init string, remember those!), and so the connection was so bad I couldn't even get a page to load.

Thankfully there's mobile tethering/hot-spotting now

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#350

Post by ajtaylor »

oinksoft wrote: post #316
baby wrote: post #248

Oh man. I was a "web developer" back then. - I'm surprised he didn't mention tables. That's the first thing that came to my mind. We didn't use CSS but tables to make a layout. And I have to admit I miss them. Yes we have grid systems like bootstrap now but still, tables were damn easy. - What about those counters that were displaying how many visitors had came since the website creation - Those "in construction" pag…

> - all those crappy tutorials and all the real "books" I > had to buy to learn. You didn't use Webmonkey?

Webmonkey was pretty cool back then for sure! Still, nothing beat a good, heavy paper book in my hands.
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