4 ms·

OMG why is that button blurry? If I were a kid today I'd wonder why old people ever bothered watching television or browsing the internet at all. At the same

OMG why is that button blurry? If I were a kid today I'd wonder why old people ever bothered watching television or browsing the internet at all. At the same time, I probably wouldn't even notice that famous Beatles recordings were recorded in mono.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Doing graphic design on a janky 17" CRT at 1024x768 resolution wasn't the best experience. In '98 it was still pretty early days for the web and web design was a bit of a wild west (much like the TV show) where any random person with an email address, website, and copy of Photoshop could sell their design services. Even big companies didn't have dedicated digital marketing or design divisions yet. The quality of what you got varied a lot.
kbenson 6y ago
at 858 bytes, even if you were able to connect at a full 56k connection on your modem (many people could only get some lower fraction, like 33.6 or 28.8 because of line noise), it would still take almost an eigth of a second to download the button if your connection did nothing but that. Designing for the web in the 90's and early 2000's was so much more a matter of picking the right trade-offs to make. Shitty trade-offs like "should I make this button worse to shave off 100 bytes? By itself it won't matter, but if I do it to all the butons and icons, that first page load might be a whole second or two faster..."
- dspillett 6y ago
  In '98 not many would even have 56K - unless adoption was much quicker elsewhere than here (UK). The first units didn't hit the market until '97, and were not cheap, and the V90 standard followed in early '98. Also it was rare to see more than 48K in my experience, 40K on many lines. Memories of reconnecting and forcing a 36k6 symmetric attempt (anything standard above had upstream at half the rate if down) rather than getting 48 down & 24 up, or less, because I had things to upload and needed the upstream "speed"!
  - dwighttk 6y ago
    My 56k modem often got used in 30whatevertheothernumberwas mode for stability of connection because of bad telephone wiring in my house.
  - jqcoffey 6y ago
    If memory serves 56K was pretty widespread in _availability_ by 1998. I worked at a small local ISP in San Diego from 95ish to 97ish and they were available at the tail end of my time there. You're right that it was rare to get full 56Kbps especially on the early modems and especially on the dreaded winmodems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem). All that said, I also seem to recall that at least in major cities 56Kbps never really went anywhere as cable modems started becoming widely available.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    It probably varied widely based on locale. I did tech support for a Northern California ISP in 1999, and there were plenty of people connecting at 53k, even considering that we were seeing people who were calling because of problems. 48k and 44k were also very common speeds to connect to at that time, but really whether you could connect close to the full speed depended quite a bit on the wiring in your house, from your house to and central office, and also the weather (rainy days resulting in staticy sounding lines for many people, and quite an increase in tech support calls). I also remember a fairly amazing story about how a user (which I never spoke to, but others had) finally diagnosed their own problem where their 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection would have a problem at approximately the same time each evening as when the street lamp turned on. Those old Alcatel 1000 DSL modems had notoriously bad problems with interference.
dspillett 6y ago
> OMG why is that button blurry? It isn't even their doing, it is a PayPal asset served from a PayPal domain (one referenced by their developer docs so not something just pretending to be them).
kevinmchugh 6y ago
There's a period of Beatles songs that were released in both mono and stereo and IIRC the mono productions are sometimes preferable. Some of those early stero productions are really busy and make use of the technology like they thought it would be a fad
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> At the same time, I probably wouldn't even notice that famous Beatles recordings were recorded in mono. https://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/10/10/funny-story/ https://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/10/10/funny-story/ > What’s amazing to me is that it hasn’t really mattered in any significant way. I’m sure I sweated like crazy over the stereo placement of this or that element during the mixing process, and then I just plastered over all those details with stucco, and turns out nobody really cares. Not even me, apparently. As far as my personal experience, I've noticed a stereo effect as being kind of cool on one song, and severely detrimental on one other song. Overall, my world would be better if every track was in mono. (What's the problem? "Pineapple Princess" plays on a Pandora channel of mine in stereo. I listen to Pandora with headphones. The particular stereo implementation is that the bass only plays in one of the ears. It's truly awful.) (This one, in case there are multiple covers: https://www.pandora.com/artist/annette-funicello-childrens/annettes-beach-party/pineapple-princess/TRvw2g2d59vq9r4 https://www.pandora.com/artist/annette-funicello-childrens/a... )

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Doing graphic design on a janky 17" CRT at 1024x768 resolution wasn't the best experience. In '98 it was still pretty early days for the web and web design was a bit of a wild west (much like the TV show) where any random person with an email address, website, and copy of Photoshop could sell their design services. Even big companies didn't have dedicated digital marketing or design divisions yet. The quality of what you got varied a lot.

kbenson 6y ago

at 858 bytes, even if you were able to connect at a full 56k connection on your modem (many people could only get some lower fraction, like 33.6 or 28.8 because of line noise), it would still take almost an eigth of a second to download the button if your connection did nothing but that. Designing for the web in the 90's and early 2000's was so much more a matter of picking the right trade-offs to make. Shitty trade-offs like "should I make this button worse to shave off 100 bytes? By itself it won't matter, but if I do it to all the butons and icons, that first page load might be a whole second or two faster..."

dspillett 6y ago
In '98 not many would even have 56K - unless adoption was much quicker elsewhere than here (UK). The first units didn't hit the market until '97, and were not cheap, and the V90 standard followed in early '98. Also it was rare to see more than 48K in my experience, 40K on many lines. Memories of reconnecting and forcing a 36k6 symmetric attempt (anything standard above had upstream at half the rate if down) rather than getting 48 down & 24 up, or less, because I had things to upload and needed the upstream "speed"!
- dwighttk 6y ago
  My 56k modem often got used in 30whatevertheothernumberwas mode for stability of connection because of bad telephone wiring in my house.
- jqcoffey 6y ago
  If memory serves 56K was pretty widespread in _availability_ by 1998. I worked at a small local ISP in San Diego from 95ish to 97ish and they were available at the tail end of my time there. You're right that it was rare to get full 56Kbps especially on the early modems and especially on the dreaded winmodems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem). All that said, I also seem to recall that at least in major cities 56Kbps never really went anywhere as cable modems started becoming widely available.
- kbenson 6y ago
  It probably varied widely based on locale. I did tech support for a Northern California ISP in 1999, and there were plenty of people connecting at 53k, even considering that we were seeing people who were calling because of problems. 48k and 44k were also very common speeds to connect to at that time, but really whether you could connect close to the full speed depended quite a bit on the wiring in your house, from your house to and central office, and also the weather (rainy days resulting in staticy sounding lines for many people, and quite an increase in tech support calls). I also remember a fairly amazing story about how a user (which I never spoke to, but others had) finally diagnosed their own problem where their 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection would have a problem at approximately the same time each evening as when the street lamp turned on. Those old Alcatel 1000 DSL modems had notoriously bad problems with interference.

dspillett 6y ago

> OMG why is that button blurry? It isn't even their doing, it is a PayPal asset served from a PayPal domain (one referenced by their developer docs so not something just pretending to be them).

kevinmchugh 6y ago

There's a period of Beatles songs that were released in both mono and stereo and IIRC the mono productions are sometimes preferable. Some of those early stero productions are really busy and make use of the technology like they thought it would be a fad

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> At the same time, I probably wouldn't even notice that famous Beatles recordings were recorded in mono. https://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/10/10/funny-story/ https://www.jonathancoulton.com/2008/10/10/funny-story/ > What’s amazing to me is that it hasn’t really mattered in any significant way. I’m sure I sweated like crazy over the stereo placement of this or that element during the mixing process, and then I just plastered over all those details with stucco, and turns out nobody really cares. Not even me, apparently. As far as my personal experience, I've noticed a stereo effect as being kind of cool on one song, and severely detrimental on one other song. Overall, my world would be better if every track was in mono. (What's the problem? "Pineapple Princess" plays on a Pandora channel of mine in stereo. I listen to Pandora with headphones. The particular stereo implementation is that the bass only plays in one of the ears. It's truly awful.) (This one, in case there are multiple covers: https://www.pandora.com/artist/annette-funicello-childrens/annettes-beach-party/pineapple-princess/TRvw2g2d59vq9r4 https://www.pandora.com/artist/annette-funicello-childrens/a... )