
Microsoft's homepage circa 1994 - mjswensen
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/
======
Kenji
I cannot navigate the site at all (unless I use the text menu), I always get:

 _Your current User-Agent string appears to be from an automated process, if
this is incorrect, please click this link:United States English Microsoft
Homepage_

when I click on the disk. I don't feel like a robot though.

~~~
csixty4
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look
down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you
flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, it's
belly baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn it'self over,
but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

~~~
wcchandler
It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?

~~~
nsns
Let me tell you about my mother

------
vezzy-fnord
gopher.microsoft.com. Excellent.

There's also a readme.html with notes on reconstructing this:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html)

------
OJFord
Those variable names... `var varSegmentation=0;`

~~~
agumonkey
hungarian typing

~~~
poizan42
Hungarian dynamic typing even - just prefix everything with var.

~~~
Demiurge
Thats pretty funny when taken literal, like this. On the other hand I often do
file_str and file_num to help myself.

~~~
agumonkey
After a journey into functional programming where single letter variable is
almost the norm, I came back hating this redundancy, but after a while I got
to see that variables names will pop up in different places, you might as well
stick a bit more information in their name just in case you're missing context
deep down the stack or in a commit.

~~~
melloclello
Hoon?

------
edward
And in 1998:
[http://web.archive.org/web/19981205060735/http://microsoft.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/19981205060735/http://microsoft.com/)

------
clw8
Internet Explorer was still a year away. Did they add a "Best Viewed with
Internet Explorer" button later?

------
bentcorner
... and the associated readme with some background info:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/discover/1994/readme.html)

------
erickhill
Darn, I was hoping to peruse the old HTML to see how they positioned the links
in a fun little table structure. Just a big GIF. Or maybe this was the real
deal and they used a Image Map (since removed).

~~~
antod
That reminds me of the Publisher 97 method of creating web pages: One full
size gif with a small HTML wrapper.

------
agumonkey
The Microsoft games circa 1997 was partially online too. Web Design Nostaligia
in full effect.

