Today is Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!
It being the tenth anniversary of Mozilla, Jamie "Founder of Mozilla Project" Zawinski has declared today "Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!" He's mirroring a bunch of lovely old pages from "home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation" for your antique browser pleasure.
Link
* Trivia Question #1: Do you remember why home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist?* Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?
* Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?
* 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.
the latest
latest episodes
Fun!
The tag in Trivia#3 is invisible!
Hmmm! Let's try .LT.HYPE.GT. tag.
Anyone running NEOPLANET ONLINE today? :)
looks ancient but add some fancy css to it, and it would fit right in with todays websites. i guess not much has changed!
If you're going to run lynx, allow me to suggest using GL Terminal to do it.
http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/
I remember using Netscape 1.1 on my Mac Classic II with a 9600 modem and a whopping 500meg HD and 4meg RAM. I connected to my ISP pseudo shell account through a Z-Term script I wrote myself as they had no Mac support. I mostly used telnet, pine and rn. I was mostly into ASCII art at the time.
Hypercard, now that was the future there.
JWZ had a link to bOING bOING in his bookmarks list back then too!
Wow, they even throttled their servers to 1994 speeds!
"New information is available every day on the Internet!"
http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html
heh, on Jamie's Bookmarks page (http://home.mcom.com/people/jwz/.MCOM-bookmarks.html) he has this say:
bOING bOING
These guys never ever update their content.
I prefer to view my web sites as it they were from those pre-mozilla/Post Mosaic days of yore. I just throw Firefox together with Tobi's Time Machine, and voila!
Oh, and skin your Browser with Netscape Windows 3.1 for the full effect.
It's really fun looking through those bookmarks, even if most of the pages result in 404 errors, you can see what was interesting(to Jamie anyway) back in 1994 and what is still interesting today. Boing Boing, The weather, The Game of Life, Blade Runner, HP Lovecraft. Looking through the various what's new news items is fun too.
Btw: Disclaimer: I was 12 years old in 1994, was probably still playing with my Atari and didn't have a clue what the internet was.
@12: Just for fun I pointed XENU (the link checker) at JWZ's archived bookmarks, and while most indeed are not answering now (or where the answer nowadays is nothing like it was back then), there are quite a few that have been in continuous use since then.
(This also prompted me to finally go ahead and set up my home network to use OpenDNS. It's really hard to get an honest HTTP response code these days...)
It's a bit disturbing how ephemeral the medium of our age is. How well will this period be remembered in 2094?
Nostalgia or not, I think the Circle-M with rotating planes was the BEST THROBBER EVER.
All I can glean about the HYPE tag is that it was some kind of Easter egg in Netscape and was supposed to play a certain sound file.
Original sites are down, use coral cache:
http://home.mcom.com.nyud.net/
http://home.mcom.com.nyud.net/home/whats-new.html
http://mosaic.mcom.com.nyud.net/
Love the "design" including such amazing tricks as using to make the first letter in each word bigger than the rest... :D
Also images thrown through the "emboss" filter in XV or whatever made them :)