
Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997) - Lukas_Skywalker
http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/index0.html
======
dandelany
Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in
'97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian
about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the
Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time
I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost
got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm
more than a decade into my career as a developer :)

~~~
abecedarius
I worked at JPL at the time, and the mission was a pretty big deal there too.
TV trucks in the parking lot for days. A long line outside to get your Hot
Wheels toy rover. (I guess that would've gone under the employee merchandise
link on this page, which is broken now.)

~~~
dandelany
The Hot Wheels collection was one of my prized posessions... I remember I was
disappointed by the difference in scales between the rover, lander and
capsule, so I built my own lander and capsule for the rover out of cardboard
:)

------
halotrope
That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested
on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower
compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset
preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast.

One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good
tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing
page in the long run.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text
is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow.

I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on
mobile.

(Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism
of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )

~~~
TeMPOraL
At least you get to zoom in, which is not true with most of the mobile
websites these days.

~~~
erinyong
I agree!

------
OtterCoder
This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!"

Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become
gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of
the biggest space agencies in the world.

~~~
olliej
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine
trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a
link, but didn't want to write <a href="blah">"

~~~
avar
It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS
assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a <body
background="">[1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to
download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to
download & render on your current >1MB/s connection.

Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images
just as much as purists today complain about >1MB JS/CSS assets, which given
Moore's law & the increase in network speeds works out to be the same thing,
relatively speaking.

1\.
[http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif](http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif)
-> 56K =~ 55854 bytes

~~~
anexprogrammer
Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded
with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate.

Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get
a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets
will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major
refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.

The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to
show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers
successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low
res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over
progressive JPGs.

I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a _lot_ worse. Of course it's
higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still
pay for bandwidth.

~~~
marcosdumay
The text used to bounce all the time too when images were loaded by then.

Unless, of course, one used a very modern browser, and the page author cared
to annotate every image's size. Something that nearly nobody did.

------
mhandley
Too bad it's not running on the original webserver:

    
    
      Trying 54.230.79.254...
      Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net.
      Escape character is '^]'.
      HEAD / HTTP/1.0
    
      HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
      Server: CloudFront
      Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT
      Content-Type: text/html
      Content-Length: 551
      Connection: close
      X-Cache: Error from cloudfront
      Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
      X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ6dusWopHeZOLLWVpHp__EdWDJcdTSufhQ3E8rVveg-3rAku1Gdzg==

~~~
stephen82
Yeah, they are on AmasonS3; I have just tested it myself:

    
    
            curl -vI mars.nasa.gov
    	* Rebuilt URL to: mars.nasa.gov/
    	*   Trying 52.222.171.112...
    	* Connected to mars.nasa.gov (52.222.171.112) port 80 (#0)
    	> HEAD / HTTP/1.1
    	> Host: mars.nasa.gov
    	> User-Agent: curl/7.50.1
    	> Accept: */*
    	> 
    	< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    	HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    	< Content-Type: text/html
    	Content-Type: text/html
    	< Content-Length: 93833
    	Content-Length: 93833
    	< Connection: keep-alive
    	Connection: keep-alive
    	< Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT
    	Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT
    	< Cache-Control: max-age=60
    	Cache-Control: max-age=60
    	< Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT
    	Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT
    	< ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7"
    	ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7"
    	< Server: AmazonS3
    	Server: AmazonS3
    	< X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront
    	X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront
    	< Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
    	Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
    	< X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ==
    	X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ==
    
            < 
    	* Connection #0 to host mars.nasa.gov left intact

~~~
jordache
isn't that response header a bit leaky? What value does it add to provide info
on the server

------
ckcortright
I love the link to the "all text" version.

~~~
dragonfruit
Open it on lynx using your terminal. It rocks!

~~~
ckcortright
Dude! Good find

------
erbo
And now _Pathfinder_ is just sitting there, waiting for Mark Watney to come
along and salvage it to use to contact Earth...

------
amiga-workbench
Look at those fantastic loading times, and its not pulling down 1.2mb of
cancerscript to make some text appear!

------
samsonradu
Responsive website ahead of its time

------
mo17i
Excellent UI/UX for a 1997 website! I wonder if they changed at some point.

~~~
biofox
Having checking archive.org it seems not to have changed.

NASA's main site from 1997 also has a nice interface:

[https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.g...](https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.gov/index_regular.html)

------
olliej
omg, "3d models"!! VRML!!!!! Truly this is a wonder of the era

------
augbot
Wow, great stuff and the site was last updated on my birthday! lol.. Talk
about a fun gift from the past.. :-)

------
eponeponepon
Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is
still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default
_should_ have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should
have been content that disappears.

I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say,
Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect
near-total transience over tiny, tiny timescales.

~~~
sametmax
It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while
a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.

~~~
halotrope
Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely
it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc. The first iterations of the Web
where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual
information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap
that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal
to noise ratio on most websites.

~~~
Tempest1981
It's all an effort to stimulate the reader's brain, to keep them engaged.
First text, then images, now video. Next VR?

Just like TV shows that use frequent animated overlays, and ever-changing
camera angles. If things stop moving, we reach for our smartphones.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And the effort is made to make people pay attention to crap. Just like TV
shows, if website is not crap and has actually engaging content, users won't
reach for smartphones.

