
Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago - boopsie
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/time-10-big-websites-looked-15-years/
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jaysonelliot
It seems like every 6-12 months, a tech blog will punt with some screenshots
from The Wayback Machine and a "look at the old web" article.

I'd be very interested in an article that used original screenshots from the
time, and some real historical context and insight into the technologies
powering the sites and the way people used them. Just going to Archive.org and
taking some screenshots is, well, lazy.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It would be quite interesting to see them in the browsers of the time. AFAIK
there were very big rendering differences you'd be able to see in, say, IE4 on
Windows vs Netscape 4 on Mac.

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srconstantin
I actually miss old-fashioned web design. These old pages look like text, and
not much else. But most of what I want to do online is text; I want to read
and write. The simplicity is actually an aid to clarity.

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keithpeter
I use a very plain style for my personal Web site as its aimed at teachers
(educational institutions don't always have recent computers) and students
(they tend to use phones for Web browsing).

I suspect there is considerable peer pressure on any small company or computer
professional to have a Web site that looks 'designed'. Shame really.

~~~
geoka9
And the problem with those designs is that they constantly evolve to become
worse UX-wise. The web is very much gullible to fashion change and, unlike
fashion in clothes, there seems to be no safe middle ground (like denim, for
example) that would always be relatively the same and never out of fashion.

And the low-contrast-looks-beautiful fashion is just plain crazy. Whenever I
happen to visit a pretentiously designed web site, I cringe in anticipation of
hard to read text and my browser getting jerky when trying to scroll.

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ben1040
That's not the original AltaVista page - as mentioned by the disclaimer in the
screengrab, altavista.com was not related to DEC or the AltaVista search
engine.

At least when it first opened, it was altavista.digital.com. And that confused
people; I'd tell them to go search AltaVista for something and they'd come
back confused because they wound up on some e-card site instead.

After Compaq bought DEC and retired the Digital brand, they finally took over
altavista.com.

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Tangaroa
It looks like altavista.digital.com and babelfish have "been excluded from the
Wayback Machine" so we can't see what they looked like back then unless anyone
has kept a screenshot for 15 years or has a book or newspaper with a
screenshot in it.

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Swizec
Amazon looks essentially the same. In fact, about a year or two ago it looked
almost exactly the same.

This feels interesting. I wonder why that is ...

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AVTizzle
Hah - came here to same the same.

Bezos and Amazon are among the four super-powers of the internet for good
reason. I imagine they've run cost/benefit analysis and found the ROI of
investing and focusing on any their new frontiers (AWS, Kindle, etc...) to
outweigh the ROI of a redesign at this point.

But funny all the same :)

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primigenus
"the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they
didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML."

Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of
engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website?
Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there,
and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the
need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?

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cleverjake
Page 29 of Levy's GooglePlex... "The minimalism is that we didn't have a
webmaster and had to do it ourselves" - Larry Page

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foxit
Older Amazon.com screengrabs can be found here:
[http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-
logo-...](http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-
timeline.html)

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MikeCapone
The one that jumped at me is Amazon. It's the one that has changed least.

~~~
sopooneo
And, to my mind, looked best of the lot. They had a decent and consistent
color scheme whereas most of the rest were all over the map.

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noblethrasher
I remember snobbishly (but silently) deriding the designs of Geocities (and
later Myspace) sites.

Now I dearly miss the messy and delightful variety of all that amateur self
expression.

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Tloewald
It bugs me that the writer opines amazon looks quite modern after using a 1999
page. A lot of the sites listed looked a lot more modern in 1999 than they did
in 1997.

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freehunter
_Microsoft was actually trying – and they would keep developing IE until they
released version 6, after which they stopped development, leaving the Web to
stagnate._

Uhh, apparently I just dreamed that IE7-10 existed. I must have been dreaming
that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari existed to keep the web from
stagnating. It's a shame that whole web thing isn't around anymore, I'd love
to see some foolish commentary on it.

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yahelc
Microsoft waited 5 years (Aug 2001 to Oct 2006) to release IE7. Having
defeated Netscape, they basically rested on their laurels and did nothing.
Only with the spectre of Firefox did they start even trying again, and only in
the last year or so have those efforts even been worthwhile.

~~~
freehunter
But the claim that the web stagnated because Microsoft stopped developing IE
is just wrong. Firefox picked up their slack and put forth some pretty great
efforts, far beyond what Microsoft was ever willing to do.

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sebastianavina
I still remember my geocities URI:
<http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664> I typed it so many
times before I understand relative and absolute locations... :(

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kenrikm
If only I had a time machine and a thumb drive filled with a modern web stack.
:) for some reason my memory was much more kind to these sites than the
reality, except GeoCities.. I remember thinking it looked terrible "back in
the day"

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TheBoff
The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one,
and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field
must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in
such a jump.

Is there any layout or designer that a designer wants that they can't create
on the modern web? Because there were many they couldn't back then, through
the limitations of the browsers, and internet speeds.

The next big move, I think, will be to web applications, but I would imagine
they will look fairly similar to the desktop (or perhaps iPad) applications we
have today.

~~~
rprospero
I think the argument is that looking back and laughing is a fundamental issue
of design trends. To put it differently, do you think that people won't look
back in twenty years and laugh at today's fashion trends? Fashion design has
had a few millenia to mature and we still haven't got it right. It's a little
unfair to hold web design to a higher standard.

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cwe
Anyone else appreciate the irony of the lone Google ads appearing between the
description and screenshot of Google's page?

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magnusgraviti
I think these examples show us how much have internet technologies changed and
improved.

~~~
amac
I agree with this - but I'd say the technologies that came later (aka flash)
were actually a step backwards.

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tsuyoshi
Actually, there was a Google site in 1997, at google.stanford.edu.

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reiz
Haha. Thank you for this post. They look all pretty shitty :-)

