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The 88x31 GIF Collection

cyber.dabamos.de

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Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#91

Post by donio »

bluedino wrote: post #12
bbrks wrote: post #8

For those who may be wondering why 88x31px? https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a...

>> At this point in time the largest provider of personal hosting was GeoCities. In order to improve brand awareness, they required that all free hosting users have a link back to GeoCities somewhere on the page. They helpfully provided default banners for these links at - you guessed it - the dimensions of 88x31 But that doesn't really explain why 83x31 was chosen by Geocities

My guess is that the creator of the first image didn't have an exact size in mind so when they were doodling in the bitmap editor it just happened to come out to that size and was trimmed accordingly. And then future images were made to fit.

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#92

Post by MrLeap »

pineconewarrior wrote: post #77
junon wrote: post #2

This takes me back to the days of forum signatures, planetrenders.com, pixel fonts with 1px strokes, making emoticons ( not emojis) on deviantArt, BBCode and making long-winded posts on VBulletin/PhpBB boards with the top three posts "reserved for later use". Man I wish I could go back.

Yes! This is how I got my start in design. So many Photoshop tutorials that started with Render Clouds. Haha!

clouds -> difference clouds a few times -> invert -> ctrl+L and compress = lightning is still a recipe in my muscle memory.

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#93

Post by ozaark »

treesknees wrote: post #10

I still have a collection of these 88x31 GIFs from my own websites back in the day. I never ran anything worth sharing with anyone else nowadays but it was pretty fun as a kid trying to build up services and hosting. There was a whole network of people trading "affiliate" banners, linking back and forth to each other's websites. Good times!

I was surprised the list has a couple affiliates of sites I used to run as a kid. It was one of the first ways I would navigate within a network of sites without having to use an often clunky search browsing experience at the time.

Definitely nostalgia inducing.

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#94

Post by duskwuff »

qwertox wrote: post #59
tpmx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html Why 88 by 31, anyway? Who started this? A Quora poster speculates GeoCities started this trend when they provided 88x31 GeoCities buttons for their users, but the contemporary source she references actually says the trend was started by Netscape.

I also associate that button very strongly with Netscape. I was surprised to not see one which had the Netscape logo on it, only a "Netscape Now" button was there among other "Now" buttons. I wonder if the 31px height was from the height of the logo on the right of the address bar, the one which was animated. I don't know which height it was, but it could match.

The GIFs are displayed alphabetically by filename, and are paginated. The "N" files show up on the third page:

http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#97

Post by peterhil »

pcan77 wrote: post #4

I miss this version of the internet :( Everything is so boring now.

Gemini protocol is lightweight alternative to HTTP which concentrates on the actual content (like Gopher).

I spent couple of nights just browsing random people’s pages and it felt like fresh air – and very reminiscient of the nineties web!

Give Gemini a try: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

The Lagrange browser is quite nice to browse Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#98

Post by reaperducer »

unicornporn wrote: post #66
systemvoltage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to "hand-craft" HTML. Literally, writing it and no templates so each page is unique. Gallery page was manually updated. If I kinda deeply think about it - I post may be one post every 2 months. Why the hell do I need a blogging CMS or static site generator, etc? Just craft a HTML page. You can just write it by hand. #header_h1 ...is it that much more work to write header_h1 ? Especially, every once in 2 months…

Some people still do this. http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/

Some surprisingly large tech companies still to this.

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#99

Post by jcrawfordor »

allenu wrote: post #42

I was surprised to not find any X10 ads in there, but I guess they just never did small GIFs. Some of their examples from back in the day http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html

Given X10's sort of prominent history in the home automation world and its relationship to a lot of reputable companies, I'm really curious what the story is of how X10 Inc itself went for such a sketchy advertising campaign. X10, the protocol, was heavily backed by major home technology companies like Ademco (now Honeywell), GE, NuTone, etc. X10 Inc is a direct descendant of BSR in Scotland, the original marketer of X10, and was founded by the same people.

It seems like it must have tarnished the X10 brand for the other manufacturers, although perhaps that explains why GE home security systems on the late end of the X10 era manage to describe the X10 features and functionality without ever once saying "X10"... although I more assume it's because they didn't necessarily want people to realize they could buy cheaper X10 devices at RadioShack, rather than through their alarm dealer.

Re: The 88x31 GIF Collection

#100

Post by andai »

cyberge99 wrote: post #69
NelsonMinar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine loading this page in the 90s though! One new HTTP connection at a time, a full TCP handshake. Maybe if you were lucky you were using Netscape which would load up to 4 resources at once!

We were hacking back then too. pipelining:true (Not really a hack, but a lesser known optimization)

I remember enabling this in Firefox. Why wasn't it the default?
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