5 ms·

Mars Pathfinder Mission Home Page (1997)

OtterCoder 10y ago
This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!" Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.
- olliej 10y ago
  Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write <a href="blah">"
  - avar 10y ago
    It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a <body background="">[1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as purists today complain about >1MB JS/CSS assets, which given Moore's law & the increase in network speeds works out to be the same thing, relatively speaking. 1. http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif -> 56K =~ 55854 bytes
    - olliej 10y ago
      Oh, i'm 100% sure i complained about slow pages then as well, but otoh a delayed background didn't typically* block all the content. That said this wasn't really a comment about time to load the page back then, but rather the massive amount of data pulled for exactly the same content now. There's also things like Gmail, FB, etc that do a lot of things that fundamentally wouldn't be achievable then. But i still think that there's a lot of strictly unnecessary content pulled. Things that are logically needed given the way the code is written, but i feel a bunch is overwritten, and a bunch is for stuff that i don't personally need/want, so why ship that to anyone? ;) * Ok, ignoring bright yellow text on a white background until the swirly background image comes into existence. I guess the early internet was similar to those old "awful myspace page" competitions :D
    - stonogo 10y ago
      The difference is this site has, at the very top, a link embedded in the sentence "Here is an all text version of this page." So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.
      - avar 10y ago
        That's because "all text" was an actual accessibility concern back then, so you'd see that just like you'd see a "mobile" version now.* It doesn't mean that web programmers care less, it just means technology moved on.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Except, the difference is, there's still people on 56K connections today, once their data volume on mobile has run out. This site loads within of < 1 second for me. Any modern site? I can wait 2-3 Minutes to even begin to see text. And thanks to the assholes who want to prevent the "flash of unstyled content" I just see blank white for 2-3 minutes before seeing any actual text. By now I've written a custom tool and proxy based on Mozilla’s reader mode so I have an app, open the link in it, and it downloads only the extracted text, in markdown.
    - biofox 10y ago
      At least they had a link for an all text version. I wish more sites today had a lo-fi option.
      - tunap 10y ago
        Now we get to play whack-a-mole script blocking. Been noticing less 'Print' versions these days, too. So much for convenience & 'save the trees' if you want to print out a page without the secondary cruff.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate. Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up. The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs. I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.
      - marcosdumay 10y ago
        The text used to bounce all the time too when images were loaded by then. Unless, of course, one used a very modern browser, and the page author cared to annotate every image's size. Something that nearly nobody did.
    - pavlov 10y ago
      56K .gif image ... something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection Actually 8 seconds, because modem speeds were/are measured in kilobits per second.
  - dragonfruit 10y ago
    It just makes me sad whenever someone mentions the efficiency atrocities of the modern web. This is unacceptable to me in my spirit but gotta live with it.
- t1c1 10y ago
  High Resolution model (~1800 KB)
olliej 10y ago
omg, "3d models"!! VRML!!!!! Truly this is a wonder of the era
samsonradu 10y ago
Responsive website ahead of its time
mo17i 10y ago
Excellent UI/UX for a 1997 website! I wonder if they changed at some point.
- biofox 10y ago
  Having checking archive.org it seems not to have changed. NASA's main site from 1997 also has a nice interface: https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.gov/index_regular.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.g...
ckcortright 10y ago
I love the link to the "all text" version.
- dragonfruit 10y ago
  Open it on lynx using your terminal. It rocks!
  - ckcortright 10y ago
    Dude! Good find
amiga-workbench 10y ago
Look at those fantastic loading times, and its not pulling down 1.2mb of cancerscript to make some text appear!
eponeponepon 10y ago
Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total transience over tiny, tiny timescales.
- sametmax 10y ago
  It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.
  - halotrope 10y ago
    Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc. The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.
    - Tempest1981 10y ago
      It's all an effort to stimulate the reader's brain, to keep them engaged. First text, then images, now video. Next VR? Just like TV shows that use frequent animated overlays, and ever-changing camera angles. If things stop moving, we reach for our smartphones.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        And the effort is made to make people pay attention to crap. Just like TV shows, if website is not crap and has actually engaging content, users won't reach for smartphones.
  - 10y ago
augbot 10y ago
Wow, great stuff and the site was last updated on my birthday! lol.. Talk about a fun gift from the past.. :-)
halotrope 10y ago
That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing page in the long run.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow. I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on mobile. (Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    At least you get to zoom in, which is not true with most of the mobile websites these days.
    - erinyong 10y ago
      I agree!
  - leeoniya 10y ago
    You can add an html meta tag that would solve the mobile issues you're describing, without CSS. <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      If you set initial-scale=1, isn't width=device-width redundant?
mhandley 10y ago
Too bad it's not running on the original webserver: Trying 54.230.79.254... Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: CloudFront Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 551 Connection: close X-Cache: Error from cloudfront Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ6dusWopHeZOLLWVpHp__EdWDJcdTSufhQ3E8rVveg-3rAku1Gdzg==
- stephen82 10y ago
  Yeah, they are on AmasonS3; I have just tested it myself: curl -vI mars.nasa.gov * Rebuilt URL to: mars.nasa.gov/ * Trying 52.222.171.112... * Connected to mars.nasa.gov (52.222.171.112) port 80 (#0) > HEAD / HTTP/1.1 > Host: mars.nasa.gov > User-Agent: curl/7.50.1 > Accept: */* > < HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Content-Type: text/html Content-Type: text/html < Content-Length: 93833 Content-Length: 93833 < Connection: keep-alive Connection: keep-alive < Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT < Cache-Control: max-age=60 Cache-Control: max-age=60 < Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT < ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7" ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7" < Server: AmazonS3 Server: AmazonS3 < X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront < Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) < X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ== X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ== < * Connection #0 to host mars.nasa.gov left intact
  - jordache 10y ago
    isn't that response header a bit leaky? What value does it add to provide info on the server
dandelany 10y ago
Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm more than a decade into my career as a developer :)
- fogleman 10y ago
  Ditto. I remember looking at Pathfinder images on a computer in the town library in 1997. I was in 10th grade.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  I worked at JPL at the time, and the mission was a pretty big deal there too. TV trucks in the parking lot for days. A long line outside to get your Hot Wheels toy rover. (I guess that would've gone under the employee merchandise link on this page, which is broken now.)
  - dandelany 10y ago
    The Hot Wheels collection was one of my prized posessions... I remember I was disappointed by the difference in scales between the rover, lander and capsule, so I built my own lander and capsule for the rover out of cardboard :)
  - seansmccullough 10y ago
    Still available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Wheels-Sojourner-Rover-Action/dp/B000EKED6I https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Wheels-Sojourner-Rover-Action/dp/...
erbo 10y ago
And now Pathfinder is just sitting there, waiting for Mark Watney to come along and salvage it to use to contact Earth...

This is brilliant! "Virtual Reality models and animations galore!" Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.

olliej 10y ago
Remember when you could browse the internet on a 56k modem? Can you imagine trying to do that today? "Here download 1meg of JS because i want to have a link, but didn't want to write <a href="blah">"
- avar 10y ago
  It's extremely amusing to see someone nostalgically complain about huge JS assets, when every subpage on that site has a 56K *.gif image as a <body background="">[1], i.e. something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection. Just like 1MB of JS takes about a second to download & render on your current >1MB/s connection. Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as purists today complain about >1MB JS/CSS assets, which given Moore's law & the increase in network speeds works out to be the same thing, relatively speaking. 1. http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif -> 56K =~ 55854 bytes
  - olliej 10y ago
    Oh, i'm 100% sure i complained about slow pages then as well, but otoh a delayed background didn't typically* block all the content. That said this wasn't really a comment about time to load the page back then, but rather the massive amount of data pulled for exactly the same content now. There's also things like Gmail, FB, etc that do a lot of things that fundamentally wouldn't be achievable then. But i still think that there's a lot of strictly unnecessary content pulled. Things that are logically needed given the way the code is written, but i feel a bunch is overwritten, and a bunch is for stuff that i don't personally need/want, so why ship that to anyone? ;) * Ok, ignoring bright yellow text on a white background until the swirly background image comes into existence. I guess the early internet was similar to those old "awful myspace page" competitions :D
  - stonogo 10y ago
    The difference is this site has, at the very top, a link embedded in the sentence "Here is an all text version of this page." So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.
    - avar 10y ago
      That's because "all text" was an actual accessibility concern back then, so you'd see that just like you'd see a "mobile" version now.* It doesn't mean that web programmers care less, it just means technology moved on.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Except, the difference is, there's still people on 56K connections today, once their data volume on mobile has run out. This site loads within of < 1 second for me. Any modern site? I can wait 2-3 Minutes to even begin to see text. And thanks to the assholes who want to prevent the "flash of unstyled content" I just see blank white for 2-3 minutes before seeing any actual text. By now I've written a custom tool and proxy based on Mozilla’s reader mode so I have an app, open the link in it, and it downloads only the extracted text, in markdown.
  - biofox 10y ago
    At least they had a link for an all text version. I wish more sites today had a lo-fi option.
    - tunap 10y ago
      Now we get to play whack-a-mole script blocking. Been noticing less 'Print' versions these days, too. So much for convenience & 'save the trees' if you want to print out a page without the secondary cruff.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Even if NASA had made every link a 56K GIF they would have slowly lazy loaded with an image outline and Alt text shown allowing you to navigate. Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up. The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs. I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      The text used to bounce all the time too when images were loaded by then. Unless, of course, one used a very modern browser, and the page author cared to annotate every image's size. Something that nearly nobody did.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    56K .gif image ... something that would have taken a full second to download on a 56K connection Actually 8 seconds, because modem speeds were/are measured in kilobits per second.
- dragonfruit 10y ago
  It just makes me sad whenever someone mentions the efficiency atrocities of the modern web. This is unacceptable to me in my spirit but gotta live with it.
t1c1 10y ago
High Resolution model (~1800 KB)

olliej 10y ago

omg, "3d models"!! VRML!!!!! Truly this is a wonder of the era

samsonradu 10y ago

Responsive website ahead of its time

mo17i 10y ago

Excellent UI/UX for a 1997 website! I wonder if they changed at some point.

biofox 10y ago
Having checking archive.org it seems not to have changed. NASA's main site from 1997 also has a nice interface: https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.gov/index_regular.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970711085416/http://www.nasa.g...

ckcortright 10y ago

I love the link to the "all text" version.

dragonfruit 10y ago
Open it on lynx using your terminal. It rocks!
- ckcortright 10y ago
  Dude! Good find

amiga-workbench 10y ago

Look at those fantastic loading times, and its not pulling down 1.2mb of cancerscript to make some text appear!

eponeponepon 10y ago

Am I the only one to find it a little sad that "oh wow, ${some.website} is still online!" is such a common sentiment? It seems to me that the default should have been for content to persist, and the surprising events should have been content that disappears. I mean, 1997 is not even twenty years. Nobody expresses surprise that, say, Fight Club is still available to watch - but on the web we seem to expect near-total transience over tiny, tiny timescales.

sametmax 10y ago
It's because a website requires an active will to be maintained online, while a movie, while released, just sit here on its medium.
- halotrope 10y ago
  Incredibly the more features and bloat one adds to the pages the less likely it is to stay functional/not be hacked etc. The first iterations of the Web where nearly perfect for information retrieval / linking of actual information. We spent the last 20 years adding videos and adding tons of crap that make the whole experience worse and are quite detrimental to the signal to noise ratio on most websites.
  - Tempest1981 10y ago
    It's all an effort to stimulate the reader's brain, to keep them engaged. First text, then images, now video. Next VR? Just like TV shows that use frequent animated overlays, and ever-changing camera angles. If things stop moving, we reach for our smartphones.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      And the effort is made to make people pay attention to crap. Just like TV shows, if website is not crap and has actually engaging content, users won't reach for smartphones.
- 10y ago

augbot 10y ago

Wow, great stuff and the site was last updated on my birthday! lol.. Talk about a fun gift from the past.. :-)

halotrope 10y ago

That Page must have been really expensive. Fully responsive, seemingly tested on iPad and iPhone back when mobile browser penetration was much lower compared to now. Incredible loading times, maybe they used a lot of asset preprocessing/compressing to make the page load that fast. One thing that bothers me is that there is no Google Analytics. Without good tracking they might not be able to optimise conversion rates of the landing page in the long run.

nothrabannosir 10y ago
Haha. But is it? I'm having a very hard time reading this on a phone. The text is too small and when I zoom in (unlike on desktop) it doesn't reflow. I don't understand this "no css is best css" trope.. this is unusable on mobile. (Explicit note of the obvious which should go without saying: not a criticism of the page. Just about this HN meme of revering css-less pages. )
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  At least you get to zoom in, which is not true with most of the mobile websites these days.
  - erinyong 10y ago
    I agree!
- leeoniya 10y ago
  You can add an html meta tag that would solve the mobile issues you're describing, without CSS. <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    If you set initial-scale=1, isn't width=device-width redundant?

mhandley 10y ago

Too bad it's not running on the original webserver: Trying 54.230.79.254... Connected to d2cj35nmzi9erd.cloudfront.net. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: CloudFront Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34:50 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 551 Connection: close X-Cache: Error from cloudfront Via: 1.1 5a907351331cc8f5ed11d0a2d0f249d6.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) X-Amz-Cf-Id: FJ6dusWopHeZOLLWVpHp__EdWDJcdTSufhQ3E8rVveg-3rAku1Gdzg==

stephen82 10y ago
Yeah, they are on AmasonS3; I have just tested it myself: curl -vI mars.nasa.gov * Rebuilt URL to: mars.nasa.gov/ * Trying 52.222.171.112... * Connected to mars.nasa.gov (52.222.171.112) port 80 (#0) > HEAD / HTTP/1.1 > Host: mars.nasa.gov > User-Agent: curl/7.50.1 > Accept: */* > < HTTP/1.1 200 OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK < Content-Type: text/html Content-Type: text/html < Content-Length: 93833 Content-Length: 93833 < Connection: keep-alive Connection: keep-alive < Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:45:05 GMT < Cache-Control: max-age=60 Cache-Control: max-age=60 < Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:44:07 GMT < ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7" ETag: "e21cacedb2a8c984fac76d84cd8549a7" < Server: AmazonS3 Server: AmazonS3 < X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront < Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) Via: 1.1 09a9032b8291da9155abd9dd1a5a360e.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) < X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ== X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVDCFvz6IzsBDzJIbzL8fA7fG2MVIyydpNKP1Kkk1mr6Oh0dqYIVKQ== < * Connection #0 to host mars.nasa.gov left intact
- jordache 10y ago
  isn't that response header a bit leaky? What value does it add to provide info on the server

dandelany 10y ago

Wow, this website in particular was extremely formative for me. I was 10 in '97 and I was so excited about Pathfinder. I remember asking my librarian about it, who showed me how to use the library computers to access "the Internet" and look up the images it sent back. I think this was the first time I really appreciated the power of the web, and I've never looked back. Almost got a little emotional seeing this page still plugging along, now that I'm more than a decade into my career as a developer :)

fogleman 10y ago
Ditto. I remember looking at Pathfinder images on a computer in the town library in 1997. I was in 10th grade.
abecedarius 10y ago
I worked at JPL at the time, and the mission was a pretty big deal there too. TV trucks in the parking lot for days. A long line outside to get your Hot Wheels toy rover. (I guess that would've gone under the employee merchandise link on this page, which is broken now.)
- dandelany 10y ago
  The Hot Wheels collection was one of my prized posessions... I remember I was disappointed by the difference in scales between the rover, lander and capsule, so I built my own lander and capsule for the rover out of cardboard :)
- seansmccullough 10y ago
  Still available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Wheels-Sojourner-Rover-Action/dp/B000EKED6I https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Wheels-Sojourner-Rover-Action/dp/...

erbo 10y ago

And now Pathfinder is just sitting there, waiting for Mark Watney to come along and salvage it to use to contact Earth...