5 ms·

Do I have to be the oldest fart in the room to just naturally assume that since Mozilla was the first popular browser to show inline images, that its homepage i

Do I have to be the oldest fart in the room to just naturally assume that since Mozilla was the first popular browser to show inline images, that its homepage is the first place to look? http://home.mcom.com http://home.mcom.com Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT

prawn 6y ago
Haven’t seen you on here before. Think we had a friend in common - Martin B - from evolt days.
- handelaar 6y ago
  <waves> And at one point nearly neighbours in N7 if I recall ;)
chc 6y ago
It's somehow comforting to see that image maps from 1994 still perform like absolute crap in 2021. It's just an extra bit of authenticity.
- wahern 6y ago
  > image maps from 1994 still perform like absolute crap in 2021 I don't follow. Are you referring to the progressive GIF rendering? It seems to be working beautifully and as intended. It's a 40K GIF that downloads at 5K/s, presumably because of limited server-side throughput (artificial or real). If you just open it locally or host it somewhere else it renders instantaneously, without any hint of its progressive encoding. Or maybe that's what you were referring to--the possibly deliberate uplink throttling--and we just have different opinions about what's "beautiful". I'm curious if anyone has written a JavaScript library that emulates the browser rendering experience of 1990s modem links. That'd be cool, both from an implementation standpoint as well as viewing experience.
  - morsch 6y ago
    No, he is referring to the image map on that site. Although it worked fine for me. Here's an appropriately old school reference: https://cmd.inp.nsk.su/old/cmd2/manuals/web/using_cgi/ch9.htm https://cmd.inp.nsk.su/old/cmd2/manuals/web/using_cgi/ch9.ht...
freebuju 6y ago
Firefox really blew the early lead that they had. Fills me with immense sadness they went the Yahoo way.
dublin 6y ago
NCSA Mosaic was the predecessor to Netscape and Mozilla, and I think was the first browser to offer inline images. I remember going to Interop in 1993 and everyone was blown away by the demo of Mosaic and its inline images showing O'Reilly's GNN (Global Network Navigator) site. Somewhere, I might still have an advertising card the O'Reilly folks were handing out about it. You can see more here (and yes, bizarrely, wood-cut-look icons were a big design fashion trend for a period in the early '90s. Sun's TOPS used them extensively, too...) https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ That said, there were several earlier browsers that could opened image tags in another window or app - Viola, Cello, etc. (Even Lynx, which still exists for some bizarre reason...) As hard as it will be for the younger crowd to believe, at that time every new web site on the Internet got posted to the NCSA "What's New" page, so people would know what all's out there!
- hinkley 6y ago
  It’s remotely possible oreilly.com has one of the oldest continually existing images... they already had a shelf or two of books when Navigator launched.
hinkley 6y ago
There is always an older fart. Netscape Navigator was the second popular web browser to show images. Problem is that the first one changed their domain name since then, from ncsa.uiuc.edu to ncsa.illinois.edu, so unless there’s some obscure little server still running, those are gone. You’re going to want to look for one of the pilot sites of the internet, but find one that’s been continuously operational. The original CERN site went away.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  Cello added support for the img tag in 1993, before Netscape was ever released. At that point in time, I recall it was the second most popular GUI browser, behind NCSA Mosaic.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Welcome, older fart! Cello lost to Mosaic, Mosaic lost to Navigator, humanity lost to IE, then IE lost to Firefox, Firefox lost to webkit, and now on HN we hand-wring about whether humanity is losing to Google or not. I have had many, many conversations about the "Browser Wars" over the years and it's like talking about cross-border rivalries in the Midwest. Nobody can quite agree on who is the best or worst. Most people can't even agree about who was actually involved (is Ohio in the Midwest? People in Ohio say yes. People in the Mississippi River Valley say no). Everybody who is anybody agrees that they all hate IE/Iowa. I was trying to put together some timelines at one point and was reading biographies about Spyglass. Do you remember Spyglass? According to the founder, the Browser Wars were Spyglass versus IE (or was it Navigator?), and Spyglass won. Why? Because he was only thinking about corporate computers. That was the universe to him. Places that we all know were barely on the Internet, he felt was "The Browser War". I thought the first browser war was Mosaic vs Netscape, but as many think the IMG tag is the first real salvo in the war, Cello vs Mosaic is probably the first war, IE vs Netscape being #3.
    - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
      Hello fellow old farts. I rememer browsing on Mosaic, Cello, Slipknot, Netscape, Arachne, Phoenix/Firefox. There were doubtless others I've forgotten. Anybody remember the various 3D browsers that would visualize site relationships? Apple's Hotsauce was the first one I remember, though it was more of a text based meta browser. Then there were a few graphical windowing attmepts. The first images I remember seeing on the internet were the Clementine lunar photos, slowly rendered line by line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)

prawn 6y ago

Haven’t seen you on here before. Think we had a friend in common - Martin B - from evolt days.

handelaar 6y ago
<waves> And at one point nearly neighbours in N7 if I recall ;)

chc 6y ago

It's somehow comforting to see that image maps from 1994 still perform like absolute crap in 2021. It's just an extra bit of authenticity.

wahern 6y ago
> image maps from 1994 still perform like absolute crap in 2021 I don't follow. Are you referring to the progressive GIF rendering? It seems to be working beautifully and as intended. It's a 40K GIF that downloads at 5K/s, presumably because of limited server-side throughput (artificial or real). If you just open it locally or host it somewhere else it renders instantaneously, without any hint of its progressive encoding. Or maybe that's what you were referring to--the possibly deliberate uplink throttling--and we just have different opinions about what's "beautiful". I'm curious if anyone has written a JavaScript library that emulates the browser rendering experience of 1990s modem links. That'd be cool, both from an implementation standpoint as well as viewing experience.
- morsch 6y ago
  No, he is referring to the image map on that site. Although it worked fine for me. Here's an appropriately old school reference: https://cmd.inp.nsk.su/old/cmd2/manuals/web/using_cgi/ch9.htm https://cmd.inp.nsk.su/old/cmd2/manuals/web/using_cgi/ch9.ht...

freebuju 6y ago

Firefox really blew the early lead that they had. Fills me with immense sadness they went the Yahoo way.

dublin 6y ago

NCSA Mosaic was the predecessor to Netscape and Mozilla, and I think was the first browser to offer inline images. I remember going to Interop in 1993 and everyone was blown away by the demo of Mosaic and its inline images showing O'Reilly's GNN (Global Network Navigator) site. Somewhere, I might still have an advertising card the O'Reilly folks were handing out about it. You can see more here (and yes, bizarrely, wood-cut-look icons were a big design fashion trend for a period in the early '90s. Sun's TOPS used them extensively, too...) https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ That said, there were several earlier browsers that could opened image tags in another window or app - Viola, Cello, etc. (Even Lynx, which still exists for some bizarre reason...) As hard as it will be for the younger crowd to believe, at that time every new web site on the Internet got posted to the NCSA "What's New" page, so people would know what all's out there!

hinkley 6y ago
It’s remotely possible oreilly.com has one of the oldest continually existing images... they already had a shelf or two of books when Navigator launched.

hinkley 6y ago

There is always an older fart. Netscape Navigator was the second popular web browser to show images. Problem is that the first one changed their domain name since then, from ncsa.uiuc.edu to ncsa.illinois.edu, so unless there’s some obscure little server still running, those are gone. You’re going to want to look for one of the pilot sites of the internet, but find one that’s been continuously operational. The original CERN site went away.

curlypaul924 6y ago
Cello added support for the img tag in 1993, before Netscape was ever released. At that point in time, I recall it was the second most popular GUI browser, behind NCSA Mosaic.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Welcome, older fart! Cello lost to Mosaic, Mosaic lost to Navigator, humanity lost to IE, then IE lost to Firefox, Firefox lost to webkit, and now on HN we hand-wring about whether humanity is losing to Google or not. I have had many, many conversations about the "Browser Wars" over the years and it's like talking about cross-border rivalries in the Midwest. Nobody can quite agree on who is the best or worst. Most people can't even agree about who was actually involved (is Ohio in the Midwest? People in Ohio say yes. People in the Mississippi River Valley say no). Everybody who is anybody agrees that they all hate IE/Iowa. I was trying to put together some timelines at one point and was reading biographies about Spyglass. Do you remember Spyglass? According to the founder, the Browser Wars were Spyglass versus IE (or was it Navigator?), and Spyglass won. Why? Because he was only thinking about corporate computers. That was the universe to him. Places that we all know were barely on the Internet, he felt was "The Browser War". I thought the first browser war was Mosaic vs Netscape, but as many think the IMG tag is the first real salvo in the war, Cello vs Mosaic is probably the first war, IE vs Netscape being #3.
  - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
    Hello fellow old farts. I rememer browsing on Mosaic, Cello, Slipknot, Netscape, Arachne, Phoenix/Firefox. There were doubtless others I've forgotten. Anybody remember the various 3D browsers that would visualize site relationships? Apple's Hotsauce was the first one I remember, though it was more of a text based meta browser. Then there were a few graphical windowing attmepts. The first images I remember seeing on the internet were the Clementine lunar photos, slowly rendered line by line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)