What's interesting to me is that, in spite of the site having been online since 1998, the site has been updated long after that - on the same platform. There are new box sets from 2009 for sale, for instance.
My naive assumption is that the site works well enough, and overhauling it or moving it to another platform (even a common one, that wouldn't require as much individual upkeep) just isn't worth it.
I had a professor in college with a website like this, where it was updated each year with new course material, but still used the same Netscape Composer-generated layout from the late 90s: http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/
The course material was still relevant and being updated - more things are changing than just the year. It works well enough, and I assume he has better things to do than revamp his website.
I have boots that were made to a design which hasn’t changed in 90 years, 50 year old books (but really book design goes back way longer)... lots of things which haven’t changed in decades, some centuries.
Why should the interchange of information have to change in style as often as the clothing of fashion aficionados?
Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus.
Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
> Why should the interchange of information have to change in style as often as the clothing of fashion aficionados?
Because of Material Design, Rust or because of the management.
Using the brain is hard so they choose the path of least resistance.
> Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus.
Yes, but, but, but now we have RAM and disk space and processor power. Why not use it ?
> Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
The problem is that _only_ attracts people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
OK I’m not a fan of the ad riddled sites these days, but I think we remember a different 90s if you’re saying we were more focused on function than flare back then.
How many evolutions did the state of the art for bookbinding and typesetting go through before we ended up with the modern book?
UX and screen design are relatively new fields. I'm certain we'll eventually reach an equilibrium, based off a few decades of learnings and experience.
So, the world of ham radio is basically full of personal websites that all look like they came directly from 1998, many of which are routinely updated. You’ll have radio amateurs posting really sophisticated antenna and circuit designs on these lovely old webpages. A notable example is eQSL (eqsl.cc), which is one of the central sites for confirming on-air contacts; it definitely has that late-90s flair to it. The outmoded web design is truly one of the underappreciated joys and charms of the hobby.
Homebrew modular synthesizer websites are the same way. Straight out of 1998, but literal gold mines in terms of domain knowledge and circuit diagrams.
You wouldn't access internet over ham. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet exists, but you're not really supposed to send encrypted data over ham networks, so practical use is limited and you wouldn't be accessing those pages.
> the site has been updated long after that - on the same platform. There are new box sets from 2009 for sale, for instance.
Look ma, no CSS!
<font size="4" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF">The Dr. Quinn Mega-Set released October 28, 2008.<br>
The Dr. Quinn Slimline set released October 20, 2009.</font>
Seeing that motion-blurred animated GIF banner at the bottom gave me an intense nostalgia rush, I made a good living making those banners for a year or 2 back in the late 90s. $50-150 per banner ($25/frame), doing a few each evening, with a month or 2 backlog in the queue.
It was a fun and easily-profitable era if you knew even the basics of web/graphics.
That motion-blurred animate GIF also remind me of some videogames from that era. Anyone with more knowledge can explain why that style was used in the late 90s? Was it about low resolution and small palettes?
Each frame of the GIF in the banners took a noticeable amount of time to load back then, so the motion blur added to the movement effect, as well as signalling to the viewer that it was actually movement and not a static slideshow (which was also a common style of banner animation). I distinctly remember playing with different amounts of motion blur to see which one looked most appropriate for that animation, and simulating acceleration/etc by having the motion blur increase/decrease.
My take- Photoshop was relatively novel at the time, and motion blur was one of the earliest filters. Do this at varying levels for a few frames and you’ve got yourself an eye-catching animated gif with minimal effort.
I miss seeing really responsive and performant websites. I feel like browsing the web nowadays no matter what I end up downloading huge tracking bundles and running a ton of javascript.
When I was learning website design in the early oughts we were taught to make them 'liquid' to work on different width screens. So it was possible then, and without MBs of JS and CSS. Though there were fewer tools to do so. Tables became pseudo grid mode. I think I still prefer the simplicity of that era.
On my phone. The line lengths are too long, so zooming in to get a reasonable font size means scrolling back and forth for each line. And clicking links is a shot in the dark.
Even with the giant bundles of BS/JS downloaded, modern websites still load faster than they did in the 90s on my 56k modem.
The Dr. Quinn website takes 6 seconds to DOMContentLoaded on a 56k connection. The CNN website (my goto for bloated webpages) takes only 1 second on my "high speed" 40 Mb/s connection.
As for responsive. A lot old websites were built specifically for 800x600 displays, and look janky or are a tiny square in the corner on larger resolutions.
Another in the "still online since the '90s" list is of course the original "Space Jam" promotional website. When the new movie started being promoted they reused the domain, but obviously somebody at WB cares about internet history because they left a link to the original on the front page and moved it to a subdirectory.
There's also an old Omniture tag, with a copyright notice from 2008. Omniture was acquired by Adobe around that time, and was renamed to Adobe Analytics almost a decade ago.
The other pages have Google Tag Manager (first released 2012) installed. However the container fails to load, as either the account or container has since been deleted.
I'm slightly surprised there's no old Urchin tags floating around, then the site would be a kind of museum of web analytics services.
I don't know how many of you watched this show back in the day or even remember it, but the website has been created around 1998 and it's still online in its original form! Similar case as the old-school Space Jam website, a blast from the past :-)
Aside from not working well on devices that didn't yet exist when this was built, I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons why I don't like this design. I'm sure there are accessibility issues and other things that would be addressed now, but as for layout I still like it.
at 858 bytes, even if you were able to connect at a full 56k connection on your modem (many people could only get some lower fraction, like 33.6 or 28.8 because of line noise), it would still take almost an eigth of a second to download the button if your connection did nothing but that.
Designing for the web in the 90's and early 2000's was so much more a matter of picking the right trade-offs to make. Shitty trade-offs like "should I make this button worse to shave off 100 bytes? By itself it won't matter, but if I do it to all the butons and icons, that first page load might be a whole second or two faster..."
In '98 not many would even have 56K - unless adoption was much quicker elsewhere than here (UK). The first units didn't hit the market until '97, and were not cheap, and the V90 standard followed in early '98.
Also it was rare to see more than 48K in my experience, 40K on many lines. Memories of reconnecting and forcing a 36k6 symmetric attempt (anything standard above had upstream at half the rate if down) rather than getting 48 down & 24 up, or less, because I had things to upload and needed the upstream "speed"!
It probably varied widely based on locale. I did tech support for a Northern California ISP in 1999, and there were plenty of people connecting at 53k, even considering that we were seeing people who were calling because of problems. 48k and 44k were also very common speeds to connect to at that time, but really whether you could connect close to the full speed depended quite a bit on the wiring in your house, from your house to and central office, and also the weather (rainy days resulting in staticy sounding lines for many people, and quite an increase in tech support calls).
I also remember a fairly amazing story about how a user (which I never spoke to, but others had) finally diagnosed their own problem where their 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection would have a problem at approximately the same time each evening as when the street lamp turned on. Those old Alcatel 1000 DSL modems had notoriously bad problems with interference.
If memory serves 56K was pretty widespread in _availability_ by 1998. I worked at a small local ISP in San Diego from 95ish to 97ish and they were available at the tail end of my time there.
You're right that it was rare to get full 56Kbps especially on the early modems and especially on the dreaded winmodems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem).
All that said, I also seem to recall that at least in major cities 56Kbps never really went anywhere as cable modems started becoming widely available.
> What’s amazing to me is that it hasn’t really mattered in any significant way. I’m sure I sweated like crazy over the stereo placement of this or that element during the mixing process, and then I just plastered over all those details with stucco, and turns out nobody really cares. Not even me, apparently.
As far as my personal experience, I've noticed a stereo effect as being kind of cool on one song, and severely detrimental on one other song. Overall, my world would be better if every track was in mono.
(What's the problem? "Pineapple Princess" plays on a Pandora channel of mine in stereo. I listen to Pandora with headphones. The particular stereo implementation is that the bass only plays in one of the ears. It's truly awful.)
Doing graphic design on a janky 17" CRT at 1024x768 resolution wasn't the best experience. In '98 it was still pretty early days for the web and web design was a bit of a wild west (much like the TV show) where any random person with an email address, website, and copy of Photoshop could sell their design services. Even big companies didn't have dedicated digital marketing or design divisions yet. The quality of what you got varied a lot.
It isn't even their doing, it is a PayPal asset served from a PayPal domain (one referenced by their developer docs so not something just pretending to be them).
There's a period of Beatles songs that were released in both mono and stereo and IIRC the mono productions are sometimes preferable. Some of those early stero productions are really busy and make use of the technology like they thought it would be a fad
My naive assumption is that the site works well enough, and overhauling it or moving it to another platform (even a common one, that wouldn't require as much individual upkeep) just isn't worth it.
I had a professor in college with a website like this, where it was updated each year with new course material, but still used the same Netscape Composer-generated layout from the late 90s: http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/
The course material was still relevant and being updated - more things are changing than just the year. It works well enough, and I assume he has better things to do than revamp his website.