BrainFuel

Remember the old days? Web 0.1 Memories

I figured it’d be interesting to ask how many of you remember these 10 things from back in the day!

Add up your points:

  1. You’ve read Secrets of Successful Web Sites — 1 point if you have, 2 points if you still have your copy
  2. You remember Gabocorp and feel like they could have been so much more — 1 point if you remember it
  3. You remember Highfive.com — 1 point
  4. You had a Geocities, Anglefire, or similar site in 1996 or earlier — 1 point, make it 2 points if you can still remember the address
  5. You used either Dreamweaver 1.2, PageMill, Flash before it was Flash, Homesite 1.0 — 1 point for each
  6. You can still remember your ICQ number (without looking) — 2 points
  7. You remember when Web Page Design for Designers was cool — 1 point
  8. You were a member of the HTML Writers Guild — 1 point
  9. You once had Netscape and IE buttons on your site — 1 point
  10. You remember when Yahoo had a gray background and an aliased logo — 1 point

Scoring:
0 to 3 Points: Sorry mate, you probably didn’t build web sites in the late 90s.
4 to 7 Points: You’re gaining knowledge fast but still have things to learn.
8 to 9 Points: Very impressive. Let me guess, you never joined the HTML Writers Guild. Well neither did I.
10+ Points: You’re totally awesome and people want to be like you, you spend way to much time at the computer. You’ve probably spent more than 10,000 hrs in front of your computer in the last 10 yrs (and you thought tanning booths were for losers).

How many did you get? What do you remember?

Chris Tingom

16 responses to “Remember the old days? Web 0.1 Memories”

  2. This is hilarious! I actually was going through old sites that I havent visited in forever on Sunday. I was trying to remember Gabocorp (last I remember they had some kind of eerie cowboy like splash movie — now it appears they are just dead). I couldnt remember until I went out to the garage, got an old computer that was destined for the recycle center, booted it up and recalled the name. I was then motivated to export all the bookmarks off that computer. I can’t wait to go through all of my “web 0.1” bookmarks to see what’s still around, what’s not, and what, if anything, has changed designwise.

    Do you remember derbauer.de or nrg.be? Those are a couple of classics that keep chugging along from web0.1

    BTW: I got a 9. There were still some things I thought were not cool — no writers guild or geocitiesblahblah for me.

  3. I can’t say that I ever memorized my ICQ number, but I did use early versions of Dreamweaver and Flash.

    I also remember Archie and Veronica – even the marmot library system 🙂

    I remember when AltaVista was THE search-engine and when Yahoo was just a directory.

    I can remember using the Mozilla browser before even Netscape was around.

    I can remember when tables hit HTML and I said that this will change everything…

    I remember when Goto was pre-Overture – pre-Yahoo! Search Marketing.

    Kinda sad that I haven’t made all that much money through investments and yet I have seen it go up all around me…

  4. Okay, so I’m new to the design world. But I did manage to score 1 point for having used Pagemill. When I moved into the job I have now I inherited a site that was built in Pagemill. An ugly site to say the least. [url=http://www.middlebury.edu]The college I work for[/url] then decided to move to a cms and they required all departments, including the museum (where I work), to adopt a straight jacket look and feel. I basically get a 370-pixel column in which to add content, and no html toggle to allow me to fine tune (so my coding is getting a little rusty – not that I was ever a master coder).

    But we’ve recently been given the green light to do a complete redesign of the museum’s site (the politics of higher education can be a minefield, and persistence is often the greatest weapon), so by this fall I hope to have a new and exciting look for our pages.

  5. See what I mean about not being a great coder? That worked when I tried it on another forum. So how do you imbed urls?

  6. I scored a 0.1 (I gave myself 0.1 points for watcing my college roommate setup his webpage on Geocities & watching him use ICQ). Actually, does using PINE give you any bonus points? 🙂

  7. Yowch. I got 8 (or 9 if you count Netscape Composer as going along with Dreamweaver, Homesite, etc.)

    I’m just glad that the Wayback Machine doesn’t have my old Geocities site.

  10. How many points do we get for having a Compuserve account? I guess that is pre-web though.

    I also remember when you had to pay to have an email address, and then Juno came out with free email addresses.

    I got 7 points.

  11. I only got 11 points – May I suggest you add the following:

    – You optimized gifs by the bytes
    – You remember Netscape being cool because it did progressive scan gif’s
    – You explained the web to others as a graphical version of gopher
    – You did browser animations using server side push
    – You made server side image map cgi’s
    – You remember when domain names were free and took 2 weeks to register
    – You know what AT&F&C1&D2E1S95=47S0=0\13 does

  12. Ha, great quiz, I scored an 8. If I add in Jason Ayers’ suggestions though – ouch. I did all those things as well except for server side push animations.

    I remember when my BBS first offered “the web” by dropping you to a unix shell from which you’d launch early builds of Mozilla, and when they finally offered “internet” email addresses, so you could message people beyond the immediate community.

    (I was a big BBS geek back in the day.)

  13. I’m not sure whether to curse you for taking me back there or thank you for this intervention… so I’ll start groveling for additional points instead.

    Do I get bonus points if I say “Future Splash”? No? Oh well.

    What about at least one point if the name of your first Web site was “(Your first and last name)’s Homepage”? Please? No? Fine.

    And how come HotDog wasn’t listed on the HTML writers? HotDog was for folks like me who were blessed with the combination of no design sense and lack of skill.

    And Gabocorp v.2 was sooo much better than version 1 or 3. You know I’m right.

  14. Howdy folks, I’m currently in Brazil!
    Good comments everybody. I couldn’t remember the HotDog at the time I wrote this otherwise I would have included it. I was trying to remember the name of it.

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