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The web site that time forgot (unchanged since 1996)

Nice find!

However, to "experience" the 1996 user experience, it would be necessary to browse that page using a dial-up modem connection, and waiting for the pictures and animations to download and paint themselves in your 15" CRT monitor, little by little. :D
 
Pepinno said:
Nice find!

However, to "experience" the 1996 user experience, it would be necessary to browse that page using a dial-up modem connection, and waiting for the pictures and animations to download and paint themselves in your 15" CRT monitor, little by little. :D
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Don't know about 15", but works fine on a 17" CRT through dial up thank you very much ;).
 
Pepinno said:
Nice find!

However, to "experience" the 1996 user experience, it would be necessary to browse that page using a dial-up modem connection, and waiting for the pictures and animations to download and paint themselves in your 15" CRT monitor, little by little. :D
Click to expand...

Yes, I remember when our major Telecommunications company (TELECOM) put up it's first web site...to launch it's new ISP. From memory the front page was just one massive image (800x600?) filled with hot spots. This is 1996 or so..the page took ages to load with the modems of the day.

After a month or two they got wise and replaced it.

Tez
 
tezza said:
Yes, I remember when our major Telecommunications company (TELECOM) put up its first web site...to launch its new ISP.
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I can't help but fix your superfluous apostrophes. The possessive of "it" is "its", just like how "ours", "hers", "yours", etc. don't get an apostrophe either. ;)

Anyway, I remember some sites with large image maps would first quickly load low-res black & white images, so if you wanted to click on something right away, you could -- but if you sat and waited longer for it to load, then the black & white images would gradually be replaced with color images.
 
NeXT said:
Netscape 3.9 on Irix is totally at home with the site. :)
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I haven't tested with such an exotic system, and my Windows 95 has Netscape 4.76, but the page loads fine even on my Thinkpad 755CE's 640x480 TFT screen:

jam1v.png


jam2k.png


---

Edit: also in Internet Explorer 3.0 it renders great:

jam3.png


jam4.png
 
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At least you're not alone tezza..... My apostrophes have been commented on too. I'm sure it wont stop us sleeping at night though eh?

Ordered a new RTC for the DEC so will give Warp v3 and NS 2.x a shot at the site as soon as I'm able, then post some screenies. Good find vwestlife. It'd be interesting to see how many others there are out there of similar age.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Ordered a new RTC for the DEC so will give Warp v3 and NS 2.x a shot at the site as soon as I'm able, then post some screenies. Good find vwestlife. It'd be interesting to see how many others there are out there of similar age.
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I think we should mirror that page (just in case it vanishes some day), as it is a great testbed for pre-1998 browser compatibility (no javascript, no CSS, no browser-side scripting), and also to post screenshots of our vintage machines browsing the Intertubes in full color and showing a layout which is "not broken"... :D
 
Pepinno said:
I think we should mirror that page (just in case it vanishes some day), as it is a great testbed for pre-1998 browser compatibility (no javascript, no CSS, no browser-side scripting), and also to post screenshots of our vintage machines browsing the Intertubes in full color and showing a layout which is "not broken"... :D
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You can also use my web site, since I wrote the vast majority of it by hand, and designed it to be compatible with Netscape 3.0 and up (it even makes use of the "forbidden" BLINK command!):

http://AMStereo.s5.com/
 
vwestlife said:
You can also use my web site, since I wrote the vast majority of it by hand, and designed it to be compatible with Netscape 3.0 and up (it even makes use of the "forbidden" BLINK command!):

http://AMStereo.s5.com/
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Interesting site, and very retro-looking. Ah, the hunger for colours of those coming from the DOS command-line realm! :D

Despite the "colourful" theme, it is quite readable overall (save for the black text on dark blue background sub-title in the section http://mysite.verizon.net/tekel/amstereo/index.htm ).

I think it will work fine as a testbed for pre-1998 browsers, and will look good in the screenshots!
 
On the bright side the internet archive has it although their earliest copies seem to be on a server that crashed or is "currently down". Reminds me of the best viewed with telnet webring. I'm trying to remember if there was one for notepad too.. I think it was when some friends and I were toying with writing our own web browser and port scanners in VB. We dove into doing IRC and web by hand for a bit but it gets quite old having to respond to server queries or pull additional resources down with all the links embedded elsewhere.
 
Pepinno said:
I think we should mirror that page (just in case it vanishes some day), as it is a great testbed for pre-1998 browser compatibility (no javascript, no CSS, no browser-side scripting), and also to post screenshots of our vintage machines browsing the Intertubes in full color and showing a layout which is "not broken"... :D
Click to expand...
Of course you don't need pretty colours and pictures to get the message across. Just a black background and smudged orange text would've had the same effect you know ;)

Of course the Apple, RiscOS and Amiga fans already knew that wasn't the case.
 
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Wow, this is great! I wish companies would forget to take sites down more often. I miss the days of a simple internet, before everything got bloated and every ad needed to have a movie in it and every interface needed to be animated and built using flash. The internet is just a silly billboard for things you don't need, these days.

@vwestlife That AM radio site is great! I've actually been reading about AM radio lately so this is a very nice, and topical, site to happen upon :D.
 
You know, there used to be standards that web developers used to follow. Don't use huge pictures or large files that reduce load time for your users/viewers, if a page takes longer than X seconds to load, users will click off or back and you'll lose them, etc. It's really a shame all the sites now adays (car sites used to be the worst during the birth of the internet) are just too ignorant and don't care.
 
barythrin said:
You know, there used to be standards that web developers used to follow. Don't use huge pictures or large files that reduce load time for your users/viewers, if a page takes longer than X seconds to load, users will click off or back and you'll lose them, etc. It's really a shame all the sites now adays (car sites used to be the worst during the birth of the internet) are just too ignorant and don't care.
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Exactly! These days It's almost as if it's a race to see how bloated and unnecessary your page can be. But I guess it all boils down to the fact that the internet is largely about entertainment now, whereas it used to be more about the actual exchange of information. Much of the masses only care about "Diner Dash" and other such nonsense, instead of reading a good article or searching out the solution to a problem. Not to say that information can't be found and isn't being used these days, it just seems to be a lot harder to find.
 
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