

What Facebook, Google+ and YouTube would have looked like in 1997 - mdhayes
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/12/10/what-facebook-google-and-youtube-would-have-looked-like-in-1997/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia
Ah the olden days.
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ramblerman
What's the point of this. Just see what they actually looked like
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-
websites-looked-when-they-launched.html)

It's not like the 'fake' ones are particularly funny or anything.

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tommi
The point is to see how technology has progressed in 14 years. Your link is
irrelevant as none of the sites in question were live in 1997.

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TillE
Look at the screenshot of Amazon from 1995.

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wallywax
That screenshot is NOT from 1995. It has a reference to zShops, which didn't
launch until 1999.

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codezero
You know, there were actually good designers in the late 90s and HTML and CSS
were reasonably mature.

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mixmastamyk
Yeah, these styles seem to be targeting '94, not 97. I have fond memories of
imdb around that time in the mosaic browser I think.

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rhizome
I'm pretty sure tables had border=0 even in 94.

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seanwoods
Sites like these always trigger an upswell of nostalgia for me. Looking at
these old screenshots I can remember how hip I felt after installing Netscape
Communicator and browsing various sites. Perl was the new frontier.

The Internet still seemed like something you could wrap your head around in
its entirety, if you tried.

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laserDinosaur
Link to a link - Direct source: <http://1x-upon.com/>

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famblycat
I love the would-be prankster on the Facebook page, trying to sneak an
alert("Delete C:/?") onto the page.

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ivankirigin
What is this nonsense about google? The domain was registered in 97 and
launche in 98 <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google>

[edit: my mistake, google+]

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corin_
It says Google+ not Google.

That said, the 1998 version of Google looked much, much better than their
mocked up 1997 version of Google+.

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ivankirigin
Yeah you're right. I'd be interested in seeing some designers at these
companies build something using only the layout and styling tools supported by
most browsers of the day.

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dasil003
Me too, but to be fair, cellspacing="0" was well understood by serious web
designers at the time in contrast with these examples.

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MatthewPhillips
I like 1997 YouTube better.

~~~
Leynos
The choice of codecs and container formats gave me a giggle. It's easy to
criticize Flash, but web video was an out and out pain prior to Flash video
players.

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zandorg
It should say "RealVideo", too, actually, as that was the format of the day.

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Tangaroa
Since others are handling the arguments over technical and stylistic aspects,
I will comment on another problem with the Facebook dedesign:

Pokemon was not yet popular in 1997. The anime scene was all about Ranma,
Slayers, Evangelion, Techni Muyo, and whatever movie had aired on the Sci-Fi
channel the past Saturday. Sailor Moon was running on TV and was very popular
but we tried to forget about that. Of course, the user could be from Japan
where Pokemon had been running for half a year, or they could have gotten a
sub off Usenet, but Pokemon did not get popular in the English-speaking world
until the dub was aired later in the decade.

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thurn
The real name policy was a defining feature of Facebook. A site that doesn't
have that can hardly be called the same thing.

