fourteen-four, and ten years ago
<< Nov 8, 2005 @ 10:18 >>
Hey, I just realised that this month marks my tenth year on the world wide web. I don't even think Mosaic (my brower before I got Netscape 3.0 in '96) could render tables. There definitely weren't any background images. Text was all one color. Links were almost exclusively blue with an underline. Images couldn't be float'ed or align'ed, so they basically would just sit in the center of the screen, and that was a best case scenario. Web pages where all the content was centered down the middle, with graphical dividers and the much forgotten <hr> tag breaking up sections, were standard. I think Netscape 3.0 could do animated gifs, background images, and tables... but no background images for tables. Those were insane additions. Could it do the <font> tag, too? I think it could. Imagine that, coloured text! But like I said, these were Netscape 3.0 additions that I didn't get to enjoy until perhaps February 1996. Of course support for the animated gif meant the birth of the animated clipart website, which in turn produced many a tacky web page. The WWW sucked so much in 1995 using Mosaic that I spent almost the entirety of my time online using CompuServe instead. That would change rapidly in 1996, and eventually that year I would abandon CServe entirely in lieu of a local ISP.
Reader Comments...
November 8, 2005 @ 19:10:14
jmullan (#1015)
I remember the murky time before gopher. I remember when telnetting was something you wouldn't get in trouble for. Plain text! ANSI animations!
In my day, there was no interlink.
November 8, 2005 @ 19:12:09
jmullan (#1015)
Oh yeah, 2400 baud. Twenty-four hundred.
November 8, 2005 @ 19:18:18
xopl (#001)
telnet was grand.