Retro Yakking

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of plasticine stop motion stars Wallace and Gromit, an event brought to my attention by today’s Google doodle (pictured above).

In celebration, Aardman have posted a twenty-minute feature with animator Nick Park at the W&G Official site. In it, the Academy Award-winning creator is asked twenty specially selected questions posed to him by members of the fan club. Or at least, the website.

In fact, I think I’ll be so generous as to just leave it here for you so you don’t have to go to all that hassle of clicking around. How rather thoughtful of us, eh? Video is on the other side of the break, though thankfully not a commercial one.

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 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).

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I’m sure this advert made me believe, as a kid, that all cars were alive.

This is relatively old news, as it’s been around since June, but I forgot to write about it then so here it is now. Remember that old advert for Mars’ Milky Way with the red and blue cars in an animated road race? Well, it returned in all its upscaled glory earlier this year, complete with original theme song and tweaked pacing. Check it out and find some more yakking by hitting the ‘read more’ link.

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As with all websites, Google’s logo is an integral element of its online identity. It is as much a part of the website as the inaccurate search results, Elmer Fudd language option and that thing that corrects your search for ‘French military victories‘.

Since the search engine’s formation thirteen years ago, it’s unsurprising that Google have largely stuck with the same basic logo design: it’s simple, colourful and instantly recognisable. However, it took a few revisions and redesigns before the guys settled upon the logo we see today at some point in 1999.

Here, we take a brief look at some of the logo designs that preceded the current version, dating all the way back to 1996 with Google’s predecessor ‘BackRub’.

This primitive form of the search engine we know and love was run out of Stanford’s servers and situated in programmer Larry page’s webspace. It was at this stage they began creating Google’s now-legendary PageRank system, and by September 2006, the engine was already listing over 200 gigabytes of downloaded content.

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