I just read an article: “RIP Web Trends of the 90s,” and it reminded me how much I miss the earlier days of the wide world of webs. (Not really…) I’m talking about the 90s web; the days of old when Prodigy and AOL ruled like kings, and Geocities and Tripod hosted pretty much every personal site, free of charge. These were the days of yore when PCs were a creamy beige in color, and still had that nice 5 ¼ inch floppy drive, which would allow you to store away up to 5 of your favorite animated gifs for future viewing.
Here are a few of the web trends from that great era (some of these are repeats from the article above, but they’re classics, so I thought they were worth reiterating):
- Animated gifs (as mentioned before) – who could forget that explosion gif featured on the nearly every heavy metal fan page, or that fist gif that was continuously punching its way out of the page? I also like the “Under Construction” banner that everyone used, and the little construction guy, tirelessly working away to finish construction on your Metallica web-ring page (hosted on geocities of course).
- Webrings – speaking of webrings, what ever happened to those? I guess now that we have these search engines, it’s no longer useful to insert your site into a ring of links.
- “Best Viewed With” links to Netscape or Internet Explorer. I guess these were probably valid back then – pages probably looked quite a bit different in those old browsers. Interestingly enough, this “Best Viewed With” nonsense went out of style for awhile, but now smug Firefox users are trying to bring it back in an attempt to usurp the dominance of Internet Explorer.
- MIDI music – before mp3s assumed their rightful place as king of all things downloadable, I remember scouring the web for
- Modem sounds – I have a friend whose cell phone ringer is a recording of the beeps and hissing of an old modem dialing up to the net. I think that’s pretty funny. Now that I think about it, having to dial-up to the internet seems way old, but it wasn’t really that long ago.
- Hit Counters – on my very first webpage, I felt compelled to include one of those odometer-style hit counters at the bottom of the page (a must for any 90s website). I quickly discovered that I could grant myself instant web credibility by clicking the browser’s refresh button over-and-over in a rapid fashion.
- <marquee> or <blink> text – The telltale sign of a true 90s website is blinking or scrolling text. Often appearing in the vicinity of a glittery panda gif, colorful rainbow dots, or a barb-wire horizontal divider, the blinking and/or scrolling text adds just the right amount of class to any Web1.0 site.
