
Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive - olingern
https://www.spacejam.com/
======
mprovost
I was webmaster for this site (and thousands of others at WB) back in 2001! I
believe this was when we did the great www -> www2 migration, which was of
course supposed to be temporary. In fact I think that was when we migrated
from our own datacentre to AOL's but I could be getting the timing wrong.

Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape
Enterprise Server. Netscape had been acquired by AOL which had also just
bought Time Warner (that's why we moved to their datacentre) but somehow we
couldn't make the internal accounting work and still had to buy server
licenses.

Fun fact, unlike Apache, NES enabled the HTTP DELETE method out of the box and
it had to be disabled in your config. We found that out the hard way when one
of the sysadmins ran a vulnerability scanner which deleted all the websites.
We were forbidden from running scans again by management.

Another fun fact about NES - they were really pushing server side Javascript
as the development language for the web (and mostly losing to mod_perl). Also
back in 2001 but at a different place I worked with the person who had just
written a book on server side js for O'Reilly - he got his advance but they
didn't publish it because by the time he had finished it they considered it a
"dead technology".

Our job was basically to maintain an enormous config file for the webserver
which was 99% redirects because they would buy every conceivable domain name
for a movie which would all redirect to the canonical one. Famously they
couldn't get a hold of matrix.com and had to use whatisthematrix.com. Us
sysadmins ran our own IRC server and "302" was shorthand for "let's go" \-
"302 to a meeting". "302" on its own was "lunchtime".

I still mention maintaining this site on my CV and LinkedIn - disappointingly
I've never been asked about it in an interview. I suspect most of the people
doing the interviewing these days are too young to remember it.

~~~
newshorts
Server side JavaScript? That’ll never catch.

I love these examples of historical calls made too early...

~~~
zakki
But node js is alive now.

~~~
cpach
He was being sarcastic :)

------
Animats
Oh, that turkey. The movie, not the web site.

I once went to an industry presentation where someone on that project
described the workflow.The project got into a cycle where the animators would
animate on first shift, rendering was on second shift, printing to film was
done on third shift. The next morning, the director, producer, and too many
studio execs would look at the rushes from the overnight rendering. Changes
would be ordered, and the cycle repeated.

The scene where the "talent" is being sucked out of players had problems with
the "slime" effect. Production was stuck there for weeks as a new thing was
tried each day. All the versions of this, of which there were far too many,
were shown to us.

Way over budget. Cost about $80 million to make, which was huge in 1996. For
comparison, Goldeneye (1995) cost $60 million.

~~~
trengorilla
Awful film. I was listening to the radio the other day and they had a 10 year
old on saying Toy Story was cringe and he preferred Space Jam. I've never been
so appalled just listening to radio.

~~~
bananamerica
What are you talking about? Space Jam is great fun!

~~~
doktrin
If nothing else, the soundtrack is a really fun throwback. The monstar track
with coolio, busta rhymes, method man et al is super catchy.

------
deckarep
Needs moar stars!

It’s such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest
groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it
became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place,
tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.

I miss the good ‘ol days for what the web was intended for.

One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches
the Internet.

If you look hard enough it’s still out there.

~~~
ethbro
The best thing about the early web was that nobody knew what it was for. So
people just did things, without considering if it was "right."

Nowadays, you'd never get Bob's Labrador Page. Because _" Hi! I'm Bob. I live
in Lebanon, Kansas. I like Labrador dogs. Here are some pictures of my
favorite Labradors!"_

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Those pages still exist, except instead of being hosted on
geocities.com/area51/bobslabs it's on instagram.com/bobslabs

Not that much of a difference really IMO

~~~
ian0
Quite different. Old homepages were more "building" less "sharing". Beyond the
coding, there was planning and categorising. You put thought into the
interface and structure.

Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic
or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the
same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no
standardization ... <img> <br> <br> <img> ...

placed images.

If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with
firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver
back then.

~~~
ballenf
That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is
required to use Instagram.

And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the
thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a
treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple
minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link.
And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and
maybe bookmarking it for later.

~~~
ethbro
The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.

Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.

But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd
say < 10%.

The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site
platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And
because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked
out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).

------
sillysaurusx
I love that 1996 HTML solved deep linking. It works flawlessly:
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz1a.html)

Look, I just linked to a wrong answer the middle of a quiz. It perfectly
preserved all the state. (Fun quiz, too.)

This is mostly a tongue in cheek argument, but it has the benefit of being
true.

Sadly the quiz seems broken at question 6. But you can even un-break the quiz
by manually editing the URL to question 7:
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz7.html)

Imagine trying to do that with a React app. (And I say that as a fan of react
apps.)

The ending of the quiz is hilarious, by the way.

~~~
onion2k
_Imagine trying to do that with a React app._

It'd work fine if the developer used the URL to maintain state with React
Router's BrowserRouter or HashRouter.

~~~
GrumpyNl
All thats wrong with the modern web is in this answer.

~~~
onion2k
Probably 3/4s of the people who post on HN can attribute their entire career
existing to "the modern web", so maybe there's some good things as well as bad
things about it.

~~~
rbanffy
I believe some of the conceptual simplicity of the "olden web" is missing in
the age of leftpad.

------
aquabeagle
As is Heaven's Gate's website -
[http://heavensgate.com/](http://heavensgate.com/)

~~~
libraryatnight
I know it's partly nostalgia, but something about both of these sites feels
more fun to interact with and browse through than almost any modern website I
visit. The web used to be so much fun.

~~~
chrisco255
It's not just nostalgia, the design invites exploration. The web was truly
built for surfing back then. Now only The Feed exists.

~~~
libraryatnight
That's it, exactly.

------
godzillabrennus
Aleksandar Totic from the original mosaic team has his website still up.

[http://totic.org/nscp/index.html](http://totic.org/nscp/index.html)

Personally I enjoyed this bit:

[http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html](http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html)

If Aleksandar reads hacker news I hope he never takes that down.

~~~
fearingreprisal
"So far, I haven't received any swirl pictures from the outside world. I find
this hard to believe that we are the only ones enjoying this activity."

Hard to believe, isn't it...

~~~
rconti
We called them "swirlies" in middle school/high school. But I've never
actually seen someone get one, and it could well be mostly apocryphal. And it
wasn't something you sought out, it was like, you were getting bullied.

------
koz1000
1994 checking in!

[http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/)

Is anyone from Linköping University reading this? I need to thank them for 26
years of free hosting. :-)

~~~
caf
You should really get around to finishing those pages that link to
[http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/unfinished.html](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/unfinished.html)
any decade now.

~~~
koz1000
We're still uploading photos from that QuickTake 100...

------
rovr138
Wondered how well it would rank on those insight scores,

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spacejam.com%2F)

Looks like 80kb and they still find things.

~~~
pcurve
98 on first try, 97 on refresh. 99 on 2nd refresh. Are they just making stuff
up?

~~~
baddox
That’s an extremely small variation in score. Why would that make you think
they’re making stuff up? Networks and servers don’t always respond with
identical timings.

~~~
pcurve
Yes, 98, 97, 99 are small.

But when I punched in Google.com, I got 84, and then 78, then 90. That's a
pretty wide range.

------
abiogenesis
> Unfortunately, this only works on a Macintosh running Netscape [1]

This is the most specific "best viewed with..." message I have seen.

[1]
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html)

~~~
edbaskerville
It's even crazier than that. That page suggests using ResEdit to modify the
Netscape application to feature their spinnning basketball icon rather than
the standard "N".

(ResEdit was Apple's editor for data in the resource fork of HFS files, which
classic Mac apps used to store their assets. Mac OS X abandoned this
interesting but unusual approach in favor of the NeXT way, ".app" directory
hierarchies.)

~~~
ufmace
Well that really takes me back! It was pretty cool how classic Mac apps had
most images, text strings, that sort of thing in the standardized resource
fork structure. Which meant that you usually could alter a bunch of things
about an app's appearance and sometimes behavior by editing those resources
with a standard editor.

------
dang
If curious see also

2019
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522)

2020 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203)

(apparently it took 23 years to notice:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com))

~~~
jaredsohn
Hacker News wasn't around that whole time. But the fact that spacejam.com was
still around was a big deal a few years ago (don't remember when I first heard
that.)

From some googling, it looks like 2010 is when this made news (via reddit).

~~~
codetrotter
It’s been discussed on HN multiple other times too in addition to the ones
mentioned here.

For example, here is a discussion about it on HN from 2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807)

I remember because it was around that time I first started browsing HN.

~~~
fiblye
What's truly impressive is if you decide to creep a bit, you'll see that loads
of users from that thread still post on HN pretty actively.

HN has an insanely high retention rate for being just a little news sharing
site. Most people get bored, pissed off, or uninterested at some point and
leave. Looking at 10 year old tweet threads or reddit comment sections is
basically a graveyard in comparison. Not sure what keeps people sticking
around here.

In a couple days, it'll have been 10 years for me. Crazy.

~~~
fireattack
You mentioned Reddit being a graveyard, but is it true?

Check this thread someone linked above from 9 years ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_that_the_space_jam_website_is_still_up_and/)

I clicked about 20 profiles, at least 70% are still active.

Actually, I think this phenomenon probably is pretty common for websites that
are still on rising or at least hold still (like both HN and Reddit). Their
initial users don't just leave for no reason. Less active, perhaps.

------
skytreader
You know, back in high school when I was learning HTML + JavaScript, I was
really looking forward to creating websites that took "longer" to load[1].
Because I have associated that with complexity (understandable), and I
associate complexity with coding professionally.

Now that I _am_ coding professionally, I just wish websites would load simple
as this, with interfaces as simple as this. None of that fancy image
preloading, or disappearing/reappearing navbars, or those sidebars that
scrolled independently from the main page content.

Then again, what memories are those which time will not sweeten, right?

[1] Caveat: with the dial-up connections then, all it took were enough images
for a site to load slow. So I wanted mine to take "longer"!

~~~
dgemm
Artificial waits are still a thing all over the place, because people trust
results more when they seem to take some work to produce:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-
will-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-will-ruin-
apps-for-you)

------
aylmao
I think funnily enough, one thing that made these old websites more
interesting is how slow the web was back then.

In a way it was "animation"— I'd look at images more closely as they "scanned"
into the page and notice details I don't think I would now. In a way the fact
that all these pages load instantly now is a bit of a downer. Maybe because
there's no anticipation any more, or maybe just because the page seems more
static and unchanging.

------
bkohlmann
The website may be the same, but at least they've "updated their privacy
policy" in the lower left!

~~~
bonestamp2
The omniture javascript code is copyrighted 2008 as well.

------
rawoke083600
Of course it is still alive. It's one of those fixed-space-time-points that
all the bloody turtles and elephants are balanced on. WE take that down, who
knows where and when we will end up !?

------
muppetman
My fan website for the Australian Band The Baby Animals from 1994 is still
online.

[http://southcom.com.au/~tim/](http://southcom.com.au/~tim/)

~~~
JoshGlazebrook
I love that 404 page

------
rnotaro
The website moved a lot. See the Web Archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20041015000000*/spacejam.com/)

Some years it redirects to WB's website, sometimes to an archive website, etc.

It seems that the original was not accessible between 2000 and 2018.

~~~
pryce
It is hardly surprising that they'd reactivate it. A new Space Jam movie[1] is
coming out next year. I know this somehow and am not proud of it.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3554046/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3554046/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0)

~~~
culturestate
> I know this somehow and am not proud of it.

Anyone who has even casually followed the NBA over the last two years probably
knows this too, so you've got plenty of company.

------
saganus
Unrelated but, one old page I miss is www.whatisthematrix.com

It just redirects to www.warnerbros.com/movies/matrix/ now :(

~~~
bgutierrez
I made a few close friends there in the chat, where other hacker wannabes and
philosophy neophytes would gather. The chat forum had fun weird bugs that my
friends and I would play with in order to edit past posts, or obliterate each
other's posts. It was wonderful little corner of the web for a short while.

That was just one part of that great site. In 1999, the Internet still felt
new and full of potential. I loved all the concept art posted there, the
trailers, and finding easter eggs.

Years later I recreated the full chat for my friends, including the bugs. It

------
yellowapple
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz2.html)

Amusingly, exactly none of these answers are correct anymore (at least not
until 2028, then again in 2031).

------
rammy1234
<!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom --> from page source

~~~
mhh__
I try to leave little notes and jokes in HTML source because from when I was
growing up playing with computers to now I still look at the source just to
see if someone was expecting me. It's not very common now, unfortunately.

------
mcovalt
My mechanic’s website is a work of old-school art.

[http://www.waspauto.com/](http://www.waspauto.com/)

~~~
jamiek88
That meet the staff part was delightful.

------
rawoke083600
What would the "PageRank" value be, if this site links to you ? Such an "old ,
esteemed" site should have some "High-XP/Google-Juice" Value ?

------
shortlived
Looks like it's received the HN hug of death

    
    
      The connection has timed out
    
      The server at www.spacejam.com is taking too long to respond.

~~~
llacb47
Same here...

------
rob74
You can't finish the quiz though - you get stuck on this page:
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/lineup/quiz6.html)

Should I contact Warner?

~~~
dylan604
webmaster@spacejam.com would be a starting place

------
djhworld
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/credits.html)

Love the shout outs to the people who made the site

------
bfirsh
It's got a status page, too:
[https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en](https://twitter.com/spacejamcheck?lang=en)

------
_0o6v
I love/hate the fact it's had a cookie banner added

------
smaili
And still browser compatible :)

~~~
bitdotdash
loads very fast too!

------
ricardo81
Fascinating. The web has changed so much and so quickly over 25 years.

Looking at
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/jump/linksframes.html)

Self-evident how bad link rot can be! I think one of the links still work. A
few in there point to the old Yahoo Directory.

------
asaph
Terms and privacy policy were recently updated.

------
hedora
Oh no! The mime types for the desktop “backboards” aren’t set right! My phone
can’t render the Windows-compatible files or the Mac files!

[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html)

------
benatkin
Almost all the links here, and all the interesting ones, are gone:
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/bball/nbaframes.html)

The only remaining ones are ones I already knew about - nba.com and Yahoo!
Sports.

------
SquishyPanda23
I'm curious how this happens.

Obviously the site owner is intionally keeping the site up and dealing with
outages.

But I wonder why?

~~~
bawolff
Its quite possibly literally just a bunch of static html files. There is not
much maintenance cost there. They probably run all their static sites from the
same webservers. It may very well be the same effort to keep it as to delete
it.

~~~
daveevad
there's no way it's being maintained on same software.

so how would you make it bullet proof, just s3 and cloudfront?

so what would you say it costs a year to run?

~~~
bdcravens
It's running on a fairly current version of Apache, but aside from keeping the
server up to date, it conceivably could be running the same setup for years.

For an organization the size of Warner Bros, it's essentially free, as they
are literally doing nothing to the server for that site specifically.

However, it does look like it's running on AWS using their global accelerator
(globally optimized traffic) so I assume it's sufficiently robust.

------
golem14
Neat! OTOH, Peter Suber's Nomic page must win the contest "who has the biggest
dead-to-live link ratio":

[https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm](https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm)

------
kyoob
I use this site to calibrate my team's automated visual diff regression
testing stack.

------
j45
Oh, sitemaps. Maybe something like this could be a way to give a summary of a
website again.
[https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html](https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/sitemap.html)

------
garfieldnate
I love this! "The jamminest two minutes of trailer time that ever hit a
theater. It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it. Click the graphic
to download..."

------
mkoryak
looking through the source, there are a number of commented out links. Here is
one:

[https://www.spacejam.com/video/](https://www.spacejam.com/video/)

------
ricardoplouis
Would be a shame if someone added a..... JavaScript framework to it.

------
itskwanyall
..Did all the traffic from being on front page of HN take it down?

------
ngcc_hk
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong-
security-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/hong-kong-security-law-
fear.html) The last part is reading in conjunction with this made me feel ...
is web site more safe at least easier to be preserved than social media? I do
not doubt whether one program can deep delete social media messages, at least
one can ship one's web site as an archive and it is still readable. Priatebay
like but for individual ... so easy to silence in social media compared with
well Space Jam.

------
lowwave
As how a web site ought to be, online forever!

------
gonzo41
Great load speed!

------
ninju
Even the website cert has just been renewed (on Jun 12, 2020)

HTTPS is gaining traction :-)

I wonder if they will upgrade to HTTP/2

------
Jaruzel
The source code of each page contains a small little easter egg comment at the
top, btw.

------
anta40
Just curious, why this particular website is still being keep alive?

Nothing against it, though :D

------
kalleboo
But it’s on HTTPS now, so you can’t _actually_ load it on an old computer

~~~
mattl
Via a proxy.

------
desktopninja
I wonder how it will compare to: Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

Website and Movie :)

------
jmcgough
Some day it'll get taken down and we'll all be sad.

------
akouri
I miss the days when the web used to be this snappy and fast

------
anoplus
Seriously, modern websites should load as fast as this one

------
fignews
Each page has a funny <!— comment —>

------
anoncow
It is down now.

------
WSSP
I love it every time I see it linked

------
chrisco255
Hmm, needs more <marquee>

------
vinniejames
National treasure

------
arkis22
god damn monstars

------
gpickett00
No hit counter :(

------
fudgy73
dark mode before it was cool.

------
opqpo
*was

