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Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!
For those who hearken back to the days when browsers and web pages were far simpler, Jamie Zawinski has resurrected old domains and browsers for your viewing pleasure. "I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Øwned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below." (Seen on Boing Boing)
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Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 2:19 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] None of the "what's new [on the entire web]" links seem to be working anymore. What's wrong with people can't keep a site up for a measly fourteen years?
1994 download speeds simulated nicely ;-) Posted Apr 1, 2008 2:46 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Well, they did get the page download speed "just right" for 1994. Even with a 8Mbit/sec download connection, I'm watching progressive GIFs with link maps slowly blur into view over the course of 30 seconds... Brings back memories...
1994 download speeds simulated nicely ;-) Posted Apr 1, 2008 8:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] ... brings back memories of thinking how *fast* it was after waiting half an hour or more for one of the ancient battered 486s in the Brunel University CS department to finish logging on. (This wasn't because the machines were slow, although they were: it was the network. If a network could melt from collisions, that one would have.)
1994 download speeds simulated nicely ;-) Posted Apr 1, 2008 22:27 UTC (Tue) by Soruk (guest, #2722) [Link] That reminds me of Aberdeen's idea of running an entire lab of about 40 machines on a single segment of 10Base2 (thinnet), and having the machines run their Windows 3.1 swapfiles on a single SPARCstation machine.
1994 download speeds simulated nicely ;-) Posted Apr 2, 2008 0:01 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I think we had sixty or seventy on a single segment of 10base2, but I'm fairly sure we weren't swapping over the network. (We just did everything *else* over the network...)
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 11:17 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] Yeah, it sucks to make links to a site which then disappears. It would be useful for websites to have a longevity rating, kind of like a credit rating, which says how likely (based on past behaviour) they are to keep their pages available or at least redirecting to something that makes sense. Then you could take that into account when deciding whether to link to them. This metadata would have been hard to gather in 1993 though ;-P. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Can't do that without time travel Posted Apr 2, 2008 17:46 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] A page can live for ten years and then suddenly disappear because its owner so decides, or forgets to renew the domain.
Can't do that without time travel Posted Apr 3, 2008 15:41 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] True - past performance is not necessarily guide to future returns - I think it's a pretty good approximation though. (The number of years left until domain renewal can be used as part of the credit score.)
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 4:23 UTC (Tue) by set (guest, #4788) [Link] I actually recently ran a Netscape web server on a freshly installed Indy2 10k Impact. (Every web server needs a hardware acelerated 3d video card that takes up 3 bus slots, right?) That lasted a month, until I got p0wned. By the power bill. I measured the box dead idle sucking ~350 watts. (cost around $30 for the month) The monitor, one of those 20" trinatron boat anchors wasn't on, which is for the best as it claims to require 330 watts. It's still a fun toy to play with (the monitor comes with its own IR remote control:) but the web server is now a k6-II sucking 1/7 the power.
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 18:27 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I don't guess that was an Indy WebFORCE? The had the best slogan: To Author and To Serve. I think they came with Netscape Navigator 2, Acrobat Reader 2, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Netscape Enterprise Server, plus a pile of other junk. Back in those days it was a useful bundle. It's funny to remember when people actually made commercial software for Unix systems.
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 22:16 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Hmmm... what is funny, that is was commercial (as in "proprietary non-GPL"), or that it was Unix (as in "proprietary non-Linux")? While the latter is in decadence, the former is thriving with companies like MySQL or Trolltech, right?
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! Posted Apr 1, 2008 13:23 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] I saw this headline right after looking at a blog that turned its colors to green-on-black for the day. I thought the article would be about running old pre-CSS browsers to avoid gouging eyes out.
Best of the Web 1994 Posted Apr 1, 2008 18:51 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] It's also interesting to through the 1994 Best of the Web Awards.A fairly large fraction of the top awarded sites are actually still online, although in many cases you have to do some sleuthing with Google to find them because the original links are long broken. Some examples of still-extant top-award sites include:
A few top-award sites that no longer seem to exist in any form (often not even in the Internet Archive) include:
Best of the Web 1994 Posted Apr 1, 2008 20:50 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] Yes, but what about BobaWorld?!
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