Back in 1990s when …
Recently while messing with Ulises Pulido’s twitter I had the opportunity to read to Ulises his very first post at his personal blog, which basically talks about Software Development. His first post was written back in February 2009. After reading out loud his post we had a discussion about it.
When I read this to him he was really surprised because he did not remember writing down any of the words in the post at all. However, he remembered what his first blog was about. He said to me that he built his first web page back in 2002 when “HTML was new to me”.
We ended up discussing how the web looked like in the late 90s.
We had Geocities
Back in the late 90s there was this thing called Geocities, which was a web hosting service acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. According to wikipedia, Geocities was the third-most visited website in the internet. It had a free tier for users, like Ulises, with limited throughput data. Back then the term blog was not known. If you owned a page, it was basically a static page that you had to update every time you wanted to add new content.
He remembered this page because he invested lot of time and effort, and generated a lot of traffic (which excited him and motivated him to keep updating his page). This meant that he would go and update the content of the page frequently. Hoping not to break anything he had already done. The page was a tutorial on how to do great in Zelda video game, giving you tips and secrets about the video game.
Of course he learned a lot about it. He knew that his page was being visited from different geographies because he had a visitor map provided by Geocities and because the throughput data reached the limit once in awhile. He said that back then he did not know about image compression, then he figured out he could do that to save some data.
As he had his page, every Geocities user would have his own page. Creating their own content, about whatever they wanted. Just like a blog today. Just less easy to update.
Blinking and scrolling texts
During the discussion we remembered the time when <blink>Click here!</blink> was the coolest thing to have in your page (pretty much what Google does when you search for “blink html”); when scrolling texts and bright colors and images were part of many internet pages. We did not care that much about the color usage or the color composition.
Oh! And those pages with MIDI, that would play once you loaded the page, not caring if the user wanted to hear it or not, the page will play it. He had one in his page.
Before Whatsapp, we had LatinChat
We even discussed LatinChat, which seems it is still alive. If you are in your late 20s early 30s I think you can remember how you were able to talk to a random person in a random place of the world (mostly random because it was usually Spanish speakers). The following page is in Spanish but it pretty much summarizes the experience.
Feeling the 90s design
Out of curiosity I did a little digging on what internet pages looked like back in the late 90s and early 00s. I found some interesting links like this one that keeps screenshots of sites like Amazon in the 90s:
I found a webpage from a business that cleaned biohazard scenes in their version 1 and version 2.
How about some sites that still exists like DPGraph, a review on how CNN looked like in 1996 or the very OJ Simpson Trial Hub?
If you want to take a look on how your favorite web page looked like, you can use this web page. This organization has been taking snapshots of some websites for a long time. May be consider donating so they can keep it up and take screenshots of your favorite web page.
The web today
We have moved away from this static, colorful and happy times of web. The web has evolved, we have cleaner sites designed to create a likable experience to the user. We have terms like UX (that have been around since 1995 thanks to Don Norman and his book “The Design of Everyday Things”), and UI that are very present when designing a web page.
We have multiple languages and frameworks in JavaScript such as (but not limited to) React JS, Spring Boot or EmberJS. Take a look at the Language And Frameworks from Thought Works Technology radar and see what is new for them and what is worth assessing and or trial in their opinion.
Web technology has not stopped evolving, and is not showing signs of slowing pace anytime soon. Just take a look at The Evolution of the Web page. See how many changes we have had in the last 5 years!
We are now looking at the web not only using a computer and a browser, we are now using mobile devices, smart TVs, smart watches, smart lenses and even Virtual Reality.
All these changes I am talking about are just about the Front End. A lot has changed in the Back End as well.
It has been a long way since the latest 1990s. What will the future bring to us?
I think that it will come a day where, as we have our unique number for ID in our countries, we will have our unique web page. We will have our knowledge, our desires and our past in the web. Web companies will be created by adding all their employees web space. It will be so easy to add content to the web and make it feel like it is us, that anyone will be able to do it. We will not depend on a platform to put our data in them, we will create our own platform.
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