

“I made the first animated ‘under construction’ icon” - robin_reala
http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-Page-is-Under-Construction#2774563

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NathanKP
That's quite a story. It is humorous to think about how someone could have
such a huge impact in the early days of the internet.

Now animated GIF's are very passe, and I'm glad. Those old GIF laden sites
were worse than modern MySpace.

~~~
alex_c
_Those old GIF laden sites were worse than modern MySpace._

I disagree. There was a certain innocence and enthusiasm about them that made
them almost charming, or at least quaint. MySpace is just... bad taste.

~~~
NathanKP
I guess when you look at it like that I have to agree with you. The quality of
those old GIFs might have been bad but at least they were used with fairly
good intentions and "innocence" as you put it.

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dpcan
This brings back memories of developing websites in the late 90's. Some people
would purchase domains and want to setup a website just so they could put this
animated construction worker on the site. It was enough for some businesses to
look like they were cutting edge.

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proee
In 10 years time, I wonder what we'll look back on and see as the equivalent
"under construction" for today's internet.

\- Any guesses?

~~~
mechanical_fish
That little zoo of "bookmark this" icons that appears next to posts on some
blogs. The one with a Digg icon, a Twitter icon, Facebook, StumbleUpon, et
cetera, all right next to each other.

Tag clouds.

~~~
proee
I'd say those "bookmark this" and "email this" links are getting pretty tired
as well...

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assemble
I find the "email this" link to be extremely useful for when I want to read
something, but don't have time to right now.

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sammcd
I'm 23 and was just getting started in web development as frames where
becoming unpopular. It was amazing to read about a point in time where
animated gifs and frames where amazing new technologies that made his life
easier.

It helps me to see that maybe the things I find as very important technology-
wise, might be just as futile as an animated gif.

~~~
catch404
I remember thinking frames were the best thing for navigation because you only
needed to keep the one file updated, I didnt even know about server side
includes back then :) css came a few years later too.

~~~
pkulak
I remember when all my sites ended with .shtml and I thought it was the
coolest thing ever.

~~~
wenbert
Do you also remember the days before Google? When we had to literally submit
our sites to Yahoo's directory, etc.? Good old days :)

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prpon
Makes me nostalgic and depressed at what we thought was cool at that time. In
1996, I made a javascript image slide show hosted on geocities for pictures of
me and my girlfriend. She was really impressed at my thoughtfulness and
effort. She showed it to so many of her friends...a modern day equivalent of
that would be to post a youtube video with annotations on how beautiful she is
and do status updates on facebook/twitter about that video 900 times. :)

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zackham
I used his animated mailbox icon when I was in 5th grade on our elementary
school page
([http://web.archive.org/web/19971008155351/www.ttsd.k12.or.us...](http://web.archive.org/web/19971008155351/www.ttsd.k12.or.us/schools/tua/tua.html)).
The internet has certainly become larger and less anonymous feeling.

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Scriptor
I'm kinda interested in how they did the server push animations. Does anyone
know how exactly this was set up?

~~~
gaius
I'm struggling to remember now. It was done with MIME, but instead of
finishing with an EOF after the boundary, you would start the next image. When
it arrived (i.e. reached the next boundary) the browser would replace the
image it had with the new one. It was similar in principle to HTTP/1.1 reusing
a socket.

It did have one use - if you were doing something "live" on the server, you
could generate an image on the fly and send it, e.g. for self-updating graphs
without reloading the page. After it fell out of fashion, it wasn't until Java
that you could do that again.

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nomoresecrets
That's all well and good, but who made the first horizontal rule 'rainbow'
GIF, hmm?

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gfodor
I think I remember spiders pick of the day. Crazy.

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sebastianavina
I made the first animated "under construction" icon! Here it is!

In 1995 I had a site called the "Micro Movie Mini Multiplex" (MMMM). It
originated as a collection of push animations. Push animation isn't used
anymore, but it involved feeding individual animation frames through "server
push", which means that a connection between the server and the client was
kept alive while individual frames were fed through the connection. It was
resource intensive, but when the site began it was the only way to do
animation on the web. I collected every example I could find on the web and
built a site that aggregated these animations. I tied the individual
animations together through (what I thought was) clever commentary. The site
was relatively popular (it was Spider's Pick of the Day, who remembers that?)

In December of 1995 I was searching the web for more push animations when I
came across an unusual reference to a new form of animation. Netscape 2.0 was
in beta, and it could handle a new form of animation. Someone had hacked the
GIF image format, tweaking the interlacing so that individual frames were
displayed at regular temporal intervals. There were only a handful of
examples, but it was obvious to me that these "animated GIFs" were a major
improvement over server push animations; you didn't need to keep a connection
alive and, more interestingly, the animations could be treated like any other
image... you could save the image and reuse it. I realized that these animated
gifs would replace server push animations.

I rebuilt MMMM. I'm not an artist, but I spent several feverish weeks
animating. I took icons that were already standard on the web, imported them
into Photoshop, then modified them pixel by pixel, frame by frame, until I had
a bunch of animated icons. My total output from that time is here. (The
rebuilt MMMM used a couple other Netscape 2.0 innovations; frames, image maps,
and Javascript.)

And people loved it. They saved the animated icons and put them on their own
pages. For a very short time my site was the major supplier of animation for
other people's webpages. I had given the GIFs somewhat distinctive names, so I
was able to track their dispersal through Altavista searches (Altavista
returned pages that contained images with specific filenames) and at one
point, estimating the traffic on these pages, it occurred to me that my
animations were seen by more people daily than any other animation in history.

I did all this anonymously and without monetary reward (which made sense,
somehow, in the early days of the web). Eventually animated GIFs became
commonplace, annoying even, and my anonymous 15 minutes of fame faded. But
someday I'd like to record the moment for posterity, even if I have to do so
in some forgotten thread on some community weblog.

