You may touch the artifacts
October 26, 2023 11:19 AM Subscribe
Internet Artifacts: a thoroughly interactive multimedia timeline of the documents, technologies, and phenomena that defined the Internet in the pre-smartphone era. Come for the First Smiley (1983) and the First MP3 (1987), stay for the AOL Dial-Up handshake (1991) and the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (2006). [Via Neal.fun]
Anyone have a rough guesstimate as to when smiles got nose jobs? They went from :-) to :)
posted by Thorzdad at 11:29 AM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 11:29 AM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
Oh, this is fabulous. I love the favicon (browser tab icon). (Although I think I've always used things other than Explorer. What did we all use on Macs in the earliest days? I can't remember.)
I kind of wish there were a text table of contents (and I also wish the entries had individual URLs so you could link to one directly, sigh).
But quibbles aside, this is huge fun and also educational. I'm looking forward to clicking through the whole thing. Thank you so much for posting this, Rhaomi - this is great!
posted by kristi at 12:52 PM on October 26, 2023
I kind of wish there were a text table of contents (and I also wish the entries had individual URLs so you could link to one directly, sigh).
But quibbles aside, this is huge fun and also educational. I'm looking forward to clicking through the whole thing. Thank you so much for posting this, Rhaomi - this is great!
posted by kristi at 12:52 PM on October 26, 2023
It's somewhat...weird? unsettling? surprising?...seeing the timeline - older people (me, probably most of MeFi) distinctly recall many of these events/things, but the sense of a elapsed time just sort of slips away - until we see such events/things displayed on an actual year-by-year timeline.
posted by davidmsc at 1:44 PM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by davidmsc at 1:44 PM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
Ed. note: Wanted to fill this out some more with a list of the artifacts with links to past threads, but ran out of time and had to go with the short version; I'll add it as a comment when I have time to finish it!
posted by Rhaomi at 2:53 PM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:53 PM on October 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
In case you didn't notice until you'd skimmed through all the years, there are sometimes (but not always) multiple artifacts per year. You can use the "next artifact" button to go through them rather than going year to year. This is great, by the way.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:05 PM on October 26, 2023
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:05 PM on October 26, 2023
Oh man, Geocities. I still remember the first time I saw a JavaScript rollover on a Geocities site, and thought, "what dark magic is this?". And tiled Image backgrounds. And mouse pointer chemtrails. And Scrolling text. And the blink tag. And 'guestbooks'. And site rings.
The horror! The Horror!
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 3:55 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
The horror! The Horror!
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 3:55 PM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Does anyone know when the first banner ad and the first tracking pixel happened? I recall these causing lots of outrage at the time over the commodification of the interwebs but I haven't turned up much when I've gone looking (which i haven't done for a while).
posted by kokaku at 5:39 PM on October 26, 2023
posted by kokaku at 5:39 PM on October 26, 2023
I was pretty amazed at how actually interactive some of this stuff was - the Yahoo page you can click through and the Flash stuff works via Ruffle, etc.
Oh, this is fabulous. I love the favicon (browser tab icon). (Although I think I've always used things other than Explorer. What did we all use on Macs in the earliest days? I can't remember.)
For me it was Netscape or IE. (And Internet Explorer was actually more standards compliant back then, but only on the Mac, where it used a different rendering engine.) But this did remind me that there was a good browser called iCab, that even ran well on 68k machines.. and amazingly is still around. (Unfortunately the latest versions don't support 68k machines anymore.)
posted by mrg at 8:01 PM on October 26, 2023
Oh, this is fabulous. I love the favicon (browser tab icon). (Although I think I've always used things other than Explorer. What did we all use on Macs in the earliest days? I can't remember.)
For me it was Netscape or IE. (And Internet Explorer was actually more standards compliant back then, but only on the Mac, where it used a different rendering engine.) But this did remind me that there was a good browser called iCab, that even ran well on 68k machines.. and amazingly is still around. (Unfortunately the latest versions don't support 68k machines anymore.)
posted by mrg at 8:01 PM on October 26, 2023
Fantastic workâso much more accessible than the potted internet histories I've seen to date. I might have added Blogger and Slashdot, but can't think of too many more obvious milestones that are missing. Well, present company excluded.
Very cool to learn that there were only ten million people worldwide with an email address in 1994 (got mine through uni a year or two before).
posted by rory at 4:21 AM on October 27, 2023
Very cool to learn that there were only ten million people worldwide with an email address in 1994 (got mine through uni a year or two before).
posted by rory at 4:21 AM on October 27, 2023
I'd have liked to see a few of the weirder bits of the early internet, especially those which had an impact which is still felt today, but which we don't necessarily associate with them. For example, James Lick's homepage, which was essentially the first example of SEO; and the guy who used IP address matching to deny AOL users access to his website.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:15 AM on October 27, 2023
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:15 AM on October 27, 2023
LNSEMS
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2023
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2023
Does anyone know when the first banner ad and the first tracking pixel happened? I recall these causing lots of outrage at the time over the commodification of the interwebs but I haven't turned up much when I've gone looking (which i haven't done for a while)Hotwired ran the first banner ad in Oct 1994 for AT&T's "You Will" campaign.. (which is also a juicy bit of net nostalgia)
As far as tracking pixels go, I feel like that was a concept that a lot of us who were creating websites by hand coding HTML arrived on independently. Like I remember coming up with the idea in 1994 when I took on being the webmaster for my college paper and got a small budget to have it hosted on this ISP, and we setup a simple email newsletter to let folks know when new articles were hitting the web, and I thought having a transparent gif would be useful for tracking open rates. It struck me as clever but not necessarily novel.
I feel like another milestone that should be here is whatever date it was when .com domains officially outnumbered .edu domains.
posted by bl1nk at 11:01 AM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
« Older It has become so ordinary | Heck with it, we'll just go build our own electric... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by jacquilynne at 11:26 AM on October 26, 2023 [1 favorite]