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A collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s
- marstall 4y ago"Best Viewed with a Budgie" ???
- FredPret 4y agoIsn't almost everything?
- pfoof 4y agoAlso, anyone knows the origins of this particular resolution?
- CharlesW 4y agohttps://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html
- greatNespresso 4y agoAnd it loads pretty fast compared to 2022 websites
- jbverschoor 4y agoBlazing fast. But that's also bc of h2
- beachy 4y agoI would love to see how Netscape on a machine from back in the day would handle rendering this page.
- kreeben 4y agoMy recollection of using Netscape 4.x is - launch app - type in URL - BAM! Crash!
- m4jor 4y agoYou'd have enough time to go eat breakfast, mow the lawn, take a shower, and then come back to it being only 58% done.
- kalleboo 4y agoThe page is using Lets Encrypt HTTPS so it won't load on anything that's not quite recent. Using an HTTPS-stripping proxy I tested it on a 1995 Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c with a 33 MHz 68040 CPU running Netscape 2 Here's the video, I got bored after 10 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX1EmE4xFog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX1EmE4xFog
- beachy 4y agoThat is incredible, thank you for posting! Another comentor said "You'd have enough time to go eat breakfast, mow the lawn, take a shower, and then come back to it being only 58% done." and apart from mowing the lawn it's actually true.
- coin 4y agoThe good old days when bloated JavaScript wasn’t needed just to view read-only content
- tumultco 4y agoIf you're on a retina display, I recommend adding this CSS so it uses nearest-neighbor interpolation for the scaling: img { image-rendering: pixelated !important; }
- worldofmatthew 4y agoI would suggest adding that as a HTML style for each 88x31, rather than making every image on a webpage pixelated.
- system2 4y agoMany Quake logos. Ironically I am still playing the game on a daily basis.
- Rodeoclash 4y agoYes! The first one my eyes landed on was a mod for Quake called the "Killer Quake Patch". KQP was an amalgamation of what felt like 100s of other Quake mods all compiled together into one megapack. Horribly unbalanced but side splittingly funny when you'd take your friends head off with a the disc from the Xena TV show.
- npteljes 4y agoI like to promote FOSS among my colleagues, so at a time we ended up playing a lot of Quake 3 Arena, because of the ioquake3 project. We had such a good fun, and the game just blazes on modern hardware.
- replwoacause 4y agoI miss these earlier days when the internet was just being born. What a mess we have on our hands now.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoLayers upon layers upon layers of…
- godot 4y agoJavascript?
- unnouinceput 4y agodivs
- Aeolun 4y agoEh, this just replaced the layers of tables :)
- imiric 4y agoAds
- thisisjasononhn 4y agoA series of tubes!
- jbverschoor 4y agoBut it in VR and it's almost like a chillout session.
- fbn79 4y agoFREE was the magic word. Java was already hated (applet I think). WinRAR was still the most wanted
- alex_suzuki 4y agoIt’s funny how seeing those two numbers (88x31) together instantly triggered some really deep-rooted memories. I wish I kept I copy of “Sky’s Obervation Deck”, my crappy little Geocities page about Star Wars (I think…), proudly part of some random web ring, and surely with its share of <blink>.
- neurostimulant 4y agoHave you checked the wayback machine? Your old site might be preserved by the internet archive.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoI did, but no luck unfortunately. :-(
- aidos 4y agoMy god that brings back a lot of memories.
- artursapek 4y agocomfy
- 101008 4y agoOh, top nostalgia from the 1990s/2000s online. These buttons meant a lot to me. I think I said this on some of my old comments, but I learnt programming because I built a very popular website about a topic/fandom that I was very into back then. There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs. Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself. Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!
- matsemann 4y agoHah, same. Here the topic was Harry Potter. I had learned basic html (no css, using <font color= or imagemaps liberally), and wanted to create a school others could "attend". A copy of other sites. You could do "assignments" and earn your house points etc. But since I only knew html, how you did it was to fill in my form, which then submitted to some cgi tool online and sent me an email. Then I would manually edit my html to reflect new stats, and upload it over ftp. Luckily I had only like two close friends enrolled at that school!
- insane_dreamer 4y agoFun! I miss the electronic sounds that would play with some of the warez ones; not that I ever clicked on any of those, of course ;)
- lanbanger 4y agoGreat site, but is it finished? If not, perhaps it would benefit from a yellow and black flashing "Under Construction" banner.
- yuvadam 4y ago
- tabtab 4y agoThat's not one of the sample buttons? I was once at a modern "junk art" museum, and came across a light-switch under repair. It took several seconds before I realized it was not an (intentional) exhibit piece.
- squarefoot 4y agoOld "Under Construction" icons could make a whole category by themselves; I think I've seen at least a hundred of them, some being really creative, just like some 404 pages.
- Sharlin 4y agoHere you go: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
- xxswagmasterxx 4y agoHere are even more of them: http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
- xhrpost 4y agoI was gonna say, there must be a million more of these.
- abracadaniel 4y agoGeneral gif search from the geocities dataset is also available. https://gifcities.org/ https://gifcities.org/
- rconti 4y agoWow, even has one from a company I worked for (iPass).
- notRobot 4y agoOoh, I also have my own personal collection of these. I'll email the site admin any that they don't already have.
- omega3 4y agoPenguin Computing is larger than 88x31.
- codazoda 4y ago> NET@DDRESS - Free Email for Life I thought for sure "life" would be over by now but www.netaddress.com still looks like a 1990's website. There's some info about payments so I dunno if it stayed free, but it's crazy that it looks like you can still login if you have an account.
- matsemann 4y ago> We support Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+ From their FAQ. Built to last.
- fluoridation 4y agoEh. It looks perfectly cromulent to me. I don't think it looks out of place with modern aesthetic sensibilities, just plain.
- drbeast 4y agoMy father still has and uses a juno email account. It bothers me immensely. I know another guy who still has an active aol email too. Lgr did a video where he signed onto the old aol walled gardian browser homepage before it was killed off. I ... Want to go back guys.
- lsh123 4y agoI have a Netscape email account which I still use for some old stuff ;)
- smoldesu 4y agoThe DeviantArt stamp collection is also fun to scroll through: https://bungle.online/@DeviantArtStamps https://bungle.online/@DeviantArtStamps
- elpocko 4y agoI was online during that era but "88x31" does not ring any bells. Is it significant at all or just some arbitrary size? What about the number of animation frames? 88x31x10?
- anyfoo 4y ago88x31 in numbers doesn't ring a bell for me either, but seeing those buttons, I remember being them everywhere. Some were more common than others (HTML validated, XHTML validated, Netscape, optimized for 1024x768, Apache, ...).
- electroly 4y agoIt's only significant in the sense that so many of them were made to that same size. It was an arbitrary choice for the first button image (Netscape Now?), then everyone else copied the size and format.
- SoftAnnaLee 4y agoPlease correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that 88x31 was done because Netscape distributed similar buttons for webmasters to include on their webpages if it was optimized for the Netscape browser. Buttons which were arbitrarily 88 pixels by 31 pixels. But then as those buttons propagated, other webmasters started creating other buttons that fit in with the original Netscape buttons; copying the same dimensions and styles. Then it became an odd ad-hoc standard of that era of the internet, where you'd include 88x31 buttons because it was cool and popular. While others would be advertising their page based on how cool the buttons looked, and making them fit that standard 88x31 buttons so they were more likely to be included.
- devindotcom 4y agoExactly my question. It doesn't go cleanly into any of the common widths from the time. Common powers and multiples are way off. My guess is it was an arbitrarily chosen size on free hosting like Geocities, that fit into their default layouts and frames. Edit: Oh, someone answered in another thread - appears to be as another person remembered here: https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html
- iamjasonlevin 4y ago
- a_shovel 4y agoPart of what gets me about relics from the Geocities era, apart from the eye-catching and charmingly amateurish maximalist aesthetic, is that personal webpages were a space in a way a Twitter or Facebook profile just can't be. A profile page where you can't change the background, font, font size, font color, sidebar content, overall layout, etc, is to a webpage as a prison cell is to a home. Still, webpages can't compete with the shareability and "virality" of social media by default; it's what made them popular. The simplicity of use is also a prerequisite; there's millions of people who can't write a line of HTML or CSS, and 99% of them never will. I sometimes daydream about some service that will somehow combine the best of both worlds. Total customization with viral sharability, and without requiring technical skill. Maybe something like that's already been made; maybe we can learn something from why it failed.
- Y_Y 4y agoI think you're describing MySpace. Anyway isn't it good that it's difficult or expensive to make a pretty website? Otherwise the likes of me can post things that look good, just like government agencies and people who give a shit do. I'll just tell you to reject pandemic protocols and vote against established politicians and try absurd and dangerous pseudomedical cures. Isn't it better that me and my ilk have to design our own websites and hence signal our shittiness by having shitty aesthetics?
- Aeolun 4y agoMoney isn’t really a problem if you have billionaires to fight your fight for you.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoI miss it too, but the web is much larger and more complex now, despite how it looks from a user pov. With all those customizations and widgets also opens doors to injections and other vulnerabilities that companies simply don't want to worry about. They're too busy competing with other social media platforms that also don't have those vulnerabilities.
- reaperducer 4y ago
- keithnz 4y agoreminds me of the million dollar home page... http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage )
- heleninboodler 4y agoI love how many cliched riffs on the "Netscape NOW!" button there are. This page should be called "Web Buttons NOW!"
- par 4y agoIt's like going through my childhood photo album!
- meindnoch 4y agoAnyone remembers the forum sig subculture from the early 00s? (sig as in signature)
- ceejayoz 4y agoI remember having to impose a height limit on the forums I helped run.
- stoppingin 4y agoI look back very fondly on this era. In retrospect, it seems like the internet was a much more optimistic, much less cynical place. On a similar note, does anyone else find that new forum software UIs aren't nearly as nice and easy to navigate as the forum software of the early 2000s?
- Aeolun 4y agoI find HN to be quite easily navigable.
- stoppingin 4y agoI definitely consider Hacker News to be designed in the style of the old internet.
- neilv 4y agoold.reddit.com and HN are the two best Web forum UIs that I'm familiar with. (threading, scoring, putting message over writer, and minimizing cruft). (Though I used to have much more powerful tools for Usenet and email.)
- no_time 4y agoBy new forum software, do you mean Discourse? Like: https://forum.openwrt.org/ https://forum.openwrt.org/ It took some getting used to but now I'm actually starting to prefer it to phpbb esque forums. Apart from the terrible space utilization that is.
- 4y ago
- lasermike026 4y agoOh my word, I almost threw up.
- alphabet9000 4y agowhat a coincidence, i made 2 88x31 buttons a couple of hours ago http://jollo.org/defcon1.gif http://jollo.org/defcon1.gif http://jollo.org/letsnotencrypt.gif http://jollo.org/letsnotencrypt.gif
- drbeast 4y agoDangerously based. Should start a web 3.0 design trend where we bring this all back and make big tech ux designers cringe.
- codepoet80 4y agoMay I use your letsnotencrypt button on my retro-friendly website? Where should I link it to?
- alphabet9000 4y agoyes certainly, this page would be good to link to: http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/lets_not_encrypt.xhtml http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/lets_not_encrypt.xhtml (not my writing, but i appreciated the sentiment of it)
- npteljes 4y agoThe sentiment is there, but there's just so much wrong in this article, I can't believe it. Beginning with the fact that HTTPS certs DO provide security, exactly in the cases the author dismisses: someone who man-in-the-middles the connection, at any point between the server and the client, can't tamper with the HTTPS connection undetectably. It either requires a compromised server or domain (so you can sign the tampered content), or a compromised client, to accept a tampered content.
- RadiozRadioz 4y agoAnother coincidence: I recognized the domain you linked from the license of a Firefox extension I use. Google Images Restored. I just wanted to thank you for creating that extension, I use and appreciate it daily.
- brazzy 4y agoIrfanview. Still around and under active development. Still has the same icon. Still the best image viewer / converter / kitchensink.
- Waterluvian 4y agoOh wow I forgot about those. Why 88x31 other than consistency?
- unglaublich 4y agoNice, but lacking a visitor counter!
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoLooks like only Amazon's logo survived)
- tyingq 4y agoYou can also coax google image search into finding these with the "imagesize:" search directive. https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize%3A88x31&tbm=isch&source=hp&&oq=imagesize%3A88x31&sclient=img https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize%3A88x31&tbm=isch&s...
- _HMCB_ 4y agoAll those buttons and it still doesn’t make my browser choke like many of today’s single web pages do.
- SergeAx 4y agoI was always wondering about weird dimension choice. Why on Earth they are 88*31? Okay, 88 is divisible by 8 and 8 is bits per byte and we can bit-map one row to 11 bytes maybe, using gif paletted compression. But why 31? Why not 32, which is at least a power of 2?
- tuxone 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27518478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27518478
- corobo 4y agoSummary: Dunno. Back in the day Geocities required sites to link back to their homepage and this was one of the image sizes they provided. The linked article/comments answer when they appeared but not why that size. Lots of guesses, no solid answers.
- ghetzel 4y agoThere's no succinct way to capture how "The Future" it felt when RealPlayer rounded those corners...like we finally arrived somewhere.
- netsharc 4y agoWow, RealPlayer... I remember streaming an Internet-themed "radio show" over 28.8k modem. The hosts sounded robotic because of the compression, but it worked. And nowadays I can stream a live view of Tokyo in 4K on mt 3rd monitor just for some ambience... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjmvL3e7Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjmvL3e7Lc
- swayvil 4y agoIt's Buff! And Ballsey! (It's from a cyberpunk movie of a similar vintage. I forget the title.) I mean it sincerely. My eyes!
- chuckhoupt 4y agoJust last week I updated one of those for Retina/HDPI: https://houptlab.org/img/made-on-a-mac-20221117.png https://houptlab.org/img/made-on-a-mac-20221117.png
- thisisjasononhn 4y agoBut it's not 88x31 D:
- chuckhoupt 4y agoAh, but it's (roughly) 88x31 CSS Pixels!
- worldofmatthew 4y agoHiDPI is normally 2x res. Aka 176x62 would be correct.
- teddyh 4y ago> These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web. These were not “advertisements” as we now know the term. No, these buttons were mostly put up by users themselves, on their own web pages. Yes, ordinary users used to have their own web pages, mostly without paid advertisements. These buttons, when they linked to commercial products, were unpaid product endorsements.
- chrisco255 4y agoAffiliate links / ads existed in the 90s. I ran a Nintendo fan site and made like $100 a month on my ads which I was ecstatic about.
- teddyh 4y agoNote the word “mostly”. The now-normal kind of ads were unusual.
- chrisco255 4y agoThey were not unusual. In the 90s and early 00s, websites were littered with banner ads, popups, and toolbar downloads. They may have been unusual in the very earliest days of the web, but it didn't take long for sites to monetize with ads (was normal by late 90s).
- teddyh 4y agoAds using these buttons or on individual user’s personal web pages were unusual.
- avar 4y agoSome of them were advertisements as we know them now. In particular website authoring tools would add these unprompted as self-advertisement. That was part of the joke of "made with GNU emacs" or whatever, that you were manually adding the same advertisement the "Made with Microsoft Frontpage" users had foisted on them.
- dkga 4y agoSaudades triggered for Netscape, MacOS that I couldn’t afford, and visiting websites that people actually made.
- thisisjasononhn 4y agoI love these! :D It's so fun looking through all the relics of the old web, and the buttons still relevant to current era internet. I made one for hetzner: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/hoh-88.png https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/hoh-88.png and one for Runbox email: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/runbox-88x31.png https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/runbox-88x31.png Although I should change Hetzner to Netcup now
- graderjs 4y agoWhy. Aren’t. They. Clickable?!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twic 4y agoI had not thought about the Schwa Corporation in a long time.
- wildpeaks 4y agoOh nice, there is one from Blaxxun (the OG metaverse).
- Lammy 4y agoThat's quite a name for a company with a Munich HQ lol
- KyleBerezin 4y ago"Campaign against Frames" A quick google search lead to this https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html It is interesting to see what are now basic html features used to be contested.
- chrisco255 4y agoFrames have been deprecated: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/frame https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fr... They were very commonly used in 90s websites. Typically, you would create one html page for a Nav bar on the left and multiple html pages for your content that would appear in a content frame. In creating a link on the nav, you'd have to specify to render the content in the appropriate frame. They fell out of favor in the early-mid 00s due to issues with proper rendering on various screensizes and browsers. In addition, web crawlers could not know whether a page was supposed to be rendered within a navigation context or not, so you'd often find google linking to content pages but without the navigation frame included, leaving users stranded on the page. iframes solved these issues to a large extent, along with better, more powerful CSS.
- npteljes 4y agoFrames were (and to an extend still are) heavily abused for advertising and other purposes. You could, for example, hide the real URL of a page. The user would go to the page, the page would contain the frameset, and the frames would just load content from wherever. Really broke the promise of the URL bar, which would suggest that the page you're seeing belongs to the URL displayed.
- Daegalus 4y agoMan, this brings back memories, along with webrings, guestbooks, etc. I even made a few for my own sites, long lost, I don't even remember what my sites were, was just a young teenager. But boy do I remember that I made a few of these.
- glauber 4y agoMade with Notepad
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 4y agoWhy 88x31 anyway?
- meowmeowmoo 4y ago“Now” appears in a huge number of these…
- shepherdjerred 4y agoOh I'm definitely putting some of these on my website
- kazinator 4y agoMissing context: https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a-standard-for-a-website-button https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a...
- gennarro 4y agoBring me back to my days of obsessing over the design of k10k.net!
- timemachine 4y agoMemory lane. As a web dev from when this was the fad, many of these buttons are very recognizable
- techdragon 4y agoReminds me of a recent pondering of mine… there used to be all these “powered by Apache”, “powered by PHP” buttons that were very similar to the type of buttons in the site here. But they were vertically shorter, and you often saw them used as a block to let people know some stuff about the website, sort of like “User bars” (think that’s the right search term) for stuff in a forum signature. But despite having at some point bookmarked a similar site/page that had hundreds of these little images… age and link rot and fragile bookmark services of old have long since lost the link , and now I don’t even remember what to search for to even find such little images, there was at least a few generally accepted nouns for them … perhaps the collective HN wisdom remembers these little images and can help me find them or just want to share more early internet stories about these kinds of images.
- ben_w 4y agoI was oblivious how much hate there was for Netscape at the time. Possibly because I was on a mac and all the memes were anti-Gates (some things don't change) and anti-Microsoft.
- flippinburgers 4y agoMan I love this. And I miss this.
- pcdoodle 4y agoNeat! Thanks for sharing!