4 ms·

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

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

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)