Did Blue Peter always have such cool backing music? That sounds like Massive Attack Unfinished Sympathy...
It is! I didn't realize the song was that old. 1991!
Massive Attack were approximately 40 years ahead of their time.
Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#52Blue Peter bury time capsules and dig them up occasionally. I think I remember watching one getting buried. I just looked up one being dug up, it was much less interesting than I could've imagined.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#53This must be some kind of fake history, where are all the ads on the web sites? Where are the pages jumping around as the browser reflows the content? Why are there no auto playing videos? Next you will be telling me nobody used their real names on the Internet in those days. Definitely fake.
These absolutely existed. Image-heavy pages for which designers didn't specify the image size in HTML (i.e. many/most pages) jumped like crazy as the images slowly loaded over a modem. Maybe no auto-playing videos, but auto playing GIFs, MIDI files, and Java applets(!) were common, not to mention and tags.
Heck, I was about to joke about cookie banners not being a thing -- but they sort of were, as they had just been invented (1994 [1]), and any site which relied on them inevitably had some prominent text exhorting you to use a browser which supported them (whether you already were or not). (Or frames -- the very first web page I visited -- nintendo.com -- I was greeted with Cranky Kong lecturing me about frame support.) This was of course right next to the ubiquitous "best viewed in Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer" badge.
Oh and don't forget the toolbar plugins. Anyone from the cohort for whom the phrase "eternal September" was invented to describe had between 3-7 of these in their browser, each one taking up another half inch of real estate. So top to bottom you'd have:
* title bar
* menu bar
* (enormous) navigation bar
* bookmark toolbar
* AOL toolbar
* Yahoo! toolbar
* Ask Jeeves toolbar
* Bonzi Buddy toolbar or some other spyware
* anti-spyware toolbar
* web page
* horizontal scroll bar
* status bar
* Windows dock
And the web page itself was often divided up into multiple frames (for ads or navigation or just by accident), each with their own scroll bars because they'd be just a pixel too large to fit in their allotted space. Probably only a 1/4 of the full screen real estate would actually show content.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#54"The information superhighway" - great callback. I love the scan lines running across the CRT as she's talking in the opening clip.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet. I think that back then, you'd often host your own site. Or at least, write most of it in HTML. It was mostly your content, and maybe if on geocities or something, a few ads around the edges. Now, it's 280 chars surrounded by a whole page of, what is realistically, ads or 'not you' content. Content is broken up, piecemeal, not one. While you can setup a singular reso…
> Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!" Could be worth checking the mirror there.
Reactionary fluff != citing reactionary fluff.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!" Could be worth checking the mirror there.
Reactionary fluff != citing reactionary fluff.
Describing the internet in reactionary fluff terms != citing reactionary fluff.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reactionary fluff != citing reactionary fluff.
Describing the internet in reactionary fluff terms != citing reactionary fluff.
But that's what it is now.
Look at the news. The headlines. Entirely designed to create a reaction, to drive reaction, often entirely misrepresenting the contents of the article itself.
And news content has changed dramatically. It's all keyed to drive 'reactionary fluff' responses, so that it spreads. On Twitter. On Facebook. Via Google search.
And this is the biggest part of Twitter, Facebook. It drives clicks. It drives engagement. And by far?
If you look at sheer numbers, of what people do on the internet? It's engaging in this.
Even this site, is siloed into that model ... discussion most often about an external page. Now, this site attempts to reduce reactionary fluff, but it quite often leaks in, both through the story contents, and with people not even reading the article, just the headline.
If you take away porn, and all the SEO spam pages, and all the clone pages which use algos to clone content and just pimp ads, what does the average person use the internet for?
"Reactionary fluff" is apt.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#58Little period details: - strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera - PCs in the internet cafe, Macs in media, Acorn Archimedes (with ARM processor!) in schools - first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President - indexed-color images; you can see in one case when she changes windows and the colours go wrong in the background as the…
strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera I studied Broadcast Engineering for my degree back in 1997, and you could definitely shift the input signal to match the refresh rate of a CRT screen or a flourescent tube light on the Sony BetaCam TV studio cameras I worked with. I reckon the BBC would have been working with similar or better tech in 1995. I wonder if this might have been a…
It's more likely that either they were working to a budget, or just didn't have the time to sync. I doubt they intentionally wanted the flicker