Oct 28 2009
Retro Internet: What the web looked like in 2000
Google’s St. Patrick’s Day logo from 2000.
Doesn’t look too different, does it?
If, like me, you’re one of those people fascinated with how things used to be, then the Internet is indeed a useful source. However, have you ever stopped to think what the Internet used to look like? If you’ve been around the Internet scene since the early days then there’ll be nothing here you (possibly) haven’t seen before.
For those of you still reading, however… Today, we’re going take a trip back nine years to 2000, the date many people consider a turning point in the popularity of the web. Prior to that date, or at least that time period, organisations did not see the profitability in creating websites that nobody would visit so largely shunned the opportunity to embrace the online revolution. As a result, compared with today the Internet was relatively sparse.
That’s not to say nobody was using it, however - I, for one, was introduced to the world wide web in this year. My early net experience consisted mostly of downloading guitar tabs from early music websites, looking for video game cheats for Super Mario 64 and mucking about with Say… (awesome tool, maybe I’ll go into greater detail on that some other time).
But overall, it seemed to me an opportunity that hadn’t yet been realised - the web was still finding its feet in terms of growth and potential for worldwide collaboration. Back then, it was mostly Teletext-esque snippets of information, vanity pages and really long academic papers with little to no images. Course, there was a good reason for this - the primitive dialup connections and computers of the time limited pictures to small thumbnails.
Still, that was a marked improvement on the ASCII-only pages of the mid-90s. Just goes to show how fast the development of the WWW has been - today, it seems silly that a page with 150kib of content could take ten minutes to load.
I have to say I like the simplicity of these pages from the infant stages of the net - in terms of design, they’re far superior to many sites on the web today. There’s a general obsession with fanciness and overcomplication, often to the detriment of the information being transmitted - look no further than Wikia for an example of this.
That said, the use of image maps — that is, sites composed completely of images — was a popular technique in early web design. This has largely fallen out of usage, and shall most likely remain simply a hallmark of the web in the year 2000. Check out Hewlett-Packard’s (rather corporate) home page, complete with graphic buttons.
Hmm. HP’s site looks rather dated, doesn’t it? Still, this kind of formatting was commonplace at the time, and at least all the links are easily accessible with little to gunk up the homepage.
Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, admittedly rather brief, foray into the past, when all this, as they say, were trees. There’s just one more page to check out… unfortunately Retro Yakking did not exist back then, but a verrry primitive predecessor did. Kejinz Net, as it was known, was a collaborative effort featuring cartoons, games and an early verison of the Hindleyak, known then as ‘The Hindleyite’.
Things’ve changed quite a bit since then, haven’t they? Well, maybe not. Check back again soon and maybe we’ll address chatrooms, early search engines, newsgroups and all the other goodies offered by the Internet back in the nineties.
