
CNN – 1996 Year in Review - amerf1
http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/
======
akerro
> Then in April 1995, right after the devastating bombing at a federal
> building in Oklahoma City, the Unabomber attacked again, perhaps peeved that
> another bomber was making headlines. A package bomb killed a timber industry
> lobbyist in Sacramento. Days later, Unabomber threatened to blow up a plane
> out of Los Angeles; and then he promised to stop the bombings if The New
> York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000-word, anti-technology,
> anti-modern-civilization diatribe.

This guy must be really disappointed to see what the world has became.

[http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/una...](http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/unabomb/unabomb.index.html)

~~~
Santosh83
Yup. IIRC he continues to write from prison...

EDIT: removed hasty personal judgement.

~~~
ghostcluster
His latest book came out last year: [https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Tech-
Revolution-Theodore-John-Ka...](https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Tech-Revolution-
Theodore-John-Kaczynski/dp/1944228004)

~~~
kirykl
I wonder if the profit from the book sales goes to him ? I'd be interested in
reading it but feel conflicted about the $

~~~
Casseres
In the publisher's description it says:

> Note: Theodore John Kaczynski does not receive any remuneration for this
> book.

------
jlgaddis
Heh, I recently came across a "guestbook" [0] that I set up ~20 years ago. I
doubt that new posts work but it's still there all these years later.

HTML was so much simpler back then.

[0]:
[http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html](http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html)

~~~
wallace_f
>Hello from Croatia!

Reminds me of a feeling that the web had back then. Full of wonder,
opportunity; it felt safe, friendly, cozy. I wish I could explain it better.
Kind of like a party with trusted friends with shared interests and discovery.

Now it feels like a lot of work and little wonder. It feels unsafe, hostile
and you know you are being watched, but not for your protection.

~~~
sverige
OTOH,the oldest guestbook entry is spam advertising the signer's web page lol.
That part was there from the beginning.

~~~
wallace_f
Yea, and not just the greasy salesmanship and profiteering, but the
psychopaths and bullies were there as well.

It was still a lot different, and I liked the fact it was filled with a lot
more nerds, relatively speaking.

~~~
beamatronic
When getting online required more effort, it filtered out a lot of people who
weren't serious. I often wonder what is the equivalent to a BBS today.

------
austincheney
Contrast the load times between those 1996 pages from the current site. Keep
in mind there is probably no advertising spyware in the 96 site and it may
account for most of the HTTP requests on the current site.

~~~
eli
What was the load time of the page on Netscape Navigator and a Pentium
processor over 1996 era dialup?

~~~
rangibaby
Slow

~~~
eli
In fact, I'd guess slower than the modern cnn.com homepage on modern hardware
and software.

------
r721
>Stay up to date with the text-only version of our website
[https://lite.cnn.io](https://lite.cnn.io)

[https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600](https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600)
(10 Sep 2017)

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022)

~~~
kjullien
ok ?

~~~
r721
I mean they figured there is a demand out there for "light versions" of
websites, which this thread is mostly about.

~~~
AckSyn
there's also [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) if
we're going to talk about light versions of websites.

------
Cthulhu_
Look at how fast it is! DOM content loaded after just 100ms, whole thing done
in 400.

------
everdev
Funny that TV graphics or magazine design in '94 weren't bad, but web design
graphics were terrible.

It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, especially with
flat design and whitespace techniques.

~~~
stinky613
Let us not forget that you're talking about a time before CSS was available,
let alone well supported--let alone _consistently rendered_. This is a time
when "web safe color palette" was part of the day-to-day web design lingo.

I could see this being a fun challenge, though--how pleasant of a modern-look
web page can you make using only HTML <=v4.0; only 256 'web-safe' color
palette; limited font choices. One could demo their work via BrowserStack.

EDIT: I totally forgot to think about the fact that "whitespace techniques"
would have been quite a bit more difficult given that a good 80% of your users
were viewing on screens that were either 640x480 or 800x600. On a 640x480
screen, this comment takes up half of the space above the fold.[1]

[1] [https://imgur.com/x0keeI1](https://imgur.com/x0keeI1)

~~~
masswerk
Another thing often forgotten: font-sizes where relative to the system,
meaning, they where usually bigger on Windows (depending on the system-wide
font settings) and there was no rational for text-image integration.

This became even more severe, when pixels began to shrink with higher display
resolutions, where Windows would adjust – i.e. increase – the font-size
relatively, while Macs stuck to a positive 72dpi definition for the screen to
keep images and text in balance.

E.g., you had an image and a few lines of text to its right. Size the layout
so that the text will span vertically over the height of the image, when seen
on an average Windows system. Now, on a Mac, it's just about 2/3 of the height
… (Considering that all layout had to be done using tables, we may begin to
understand that you had to be rather defensive in your approaches. Also,
complex tables resulted in perceivable rendering times.)

------
0xcafecafe
It is interesting how pages like these are like a time capsule. For instance,
I was just watching the movie Philadelphia yesterday and how many of the
misconceptions/prejudices around AIDS were prevalent then. And here, in this
link, there is news about some advances made there.

~~~
tardo99
My recollection is the prejudices around AIDS had diminished dramatically by
the time Philadelphia came out. But, the movie is (I think) depicting a past
event when things would have been different. Also, movies often blow things a
bit out of proportion. In the early-to-mid 80s, though, it would have been
spot on.

------
pvg
This 'Year in review' page doesn't look much like the actual CNN news pages
looked:

[http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150102183958-01-cnn-
ho...](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150102183958-01-cnn-
homepage-1995-super-169.jpg)

This is from [http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/world/gallery/cnn-homepage-
thr...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/world/gallery/cnn-homepage-through-the-
years/index.html) which gives a better idea of how the front page evolved over
time.

------
grep4master
Much better load times than the current one.

~~~
savanaly
Because they wrote it in an era when internet connections were slow. They have
not necessarily moved along the time-to-load-vs-page-size tradeoff curve so
much as the curve itself has shifted due to improved connections and
computation speeds.

It's like looking at a newspaper from a century ago and remarking "how much
cheaper it was back then!" Technically you're right, but the change in nominal
price is not a useful economic indicator.

~~~
zhte415
A newspaper a century ago is an excellent analogy.

Then, the front page was filled with advertising. The content was almost
entirely sponsored, or in times of war or national fraction, overwhelmingly
towing the official line.

Newspapers a century ago are exactly the same as popular web today.

It's like looking at an article from a news site today, and being presented
with a splash-screen 5-second advert, or not being sure who sponsored the
content you're reading.

100 year old press is identical to web-news today.

------
shill
> It's a question journalists like to ask themselves at the end of ever year.

This sentence has had a typo for 21 years.

------
astura
The image map on the very bottom doesn't appear to work, at least not on
Chrome for Android.

CNN appears to never take anything down, here's CNN's coverage of the OJ
Simpson trial from 1999 -
[http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/](http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/)

~~~
richard_todd
A lot of the linked stories 404 and many image assets are missing. It’s still
cool to see the old web designs, though.

------
ghostcluster
Plane crash second biggest story of the year — CNN hasn't changed.

------
mproud
I clicked on “Games” at the bottom of the page and all I got was [this lousy
webmap
file]([http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/serverside...](http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/serverside.map?520,41)).

------
chrisco255
Well news seems to have been a lot tamer in 1996. What a monstrosity it has
has become.

------
sandworm101
Lol. As a kid I was living near Kobar towers (Dhahran). It rattled my windows.

~~~
bousaid
Wow same. My dad thought my brother and I were slamming doors. Crazy to see a
story about Dhahran.

~~~
sandworm101
Did you go to the Aramco school at dhahran? We might have met.

~~~
bousaid
Yeah. Born and raised in Dhahran. Finishing up college now! Dad was in
exploration.

------
pp19dd
Huh. Actually, it looks like they cleaned up a bit recently. As of a few weeks
ago, there were far more skeletons in place (as literally scoured from
robots.txt).

Snapshot from their antiquated ad spaces listing-
[https://pp19dd.com/2013/02/attack-of-test3-from-outer-
space/...](https://pp19dd.com/2013/02/attack-of-test3-from-outer-
space/#specimen_1)

~~~
matt4077
To nitpick on your example No 3:

The question is "what amount of money would make the injured party whole
again", to which the answer was "One million". To that one million, another
million was added in punitive damages, summing to the total of two million.

Punitive damages are added to "regular" damages. The idea is that, for
example, you may have only lost $30 when your bank fudged the numbers in their
favour. But only awarding you $30 would be too low to discourage such
behaviour by the bank, and it would also be too low to make it worth your time
and money to sue.

~~~
pp19dd
That was my point exactly- annotations that require annotations.

Think of it from the reader's perspective: they see $2 million highlighted in
an article, they mouseover, click, tap or otherwise interact with it. But then
a bubble comes up and gives them a different number that can't possibly be
immediately interpreted without further reading and maybe analysis. It's
confusing to be presented by conflicting information at a glance.

Annotations are meant to take a reader to primary evidence or otherwise
supplement an understanding. However, primary evidence isn't always so
precisely straight-forward to be able to do that sensibly- that was my point.

------
campuscodi
Waiting for someone to say "fake news" about any of the stories he doesn't
like...

------
magerleagues
Frames!

