6 ms·

Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago

48 points by boopsie 14y ago

reiz 14y ago
Haha. Thank you for this post. They look all pretty shitty :-)
magnusgraviti 14y ago
I think these examples show us how much have internet technologies changed and improved.
- amac 14y ago
  I agree with this - but I'd say the technologies that came later (aka flash) were actually a step backwards.
MikeCapone 14y ago
The one that jumped at me is Amazon. It's the one that has changed least.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  And, to my mind, looked best of the lot. They had a decent and consistent color scheme whereas most of the rest were all over the map.
ben1040 14y ago
That's not the original AltaVista page - as mentioned by the disclaimer in the screengrab, altavista.com was not related to DEC or the AltaVista search engine. At least when it first opened, it was altavista.digital.com. And that confused people; I'd tell them to go search AltaVista for something and they'd come back confused because they wound up on some e-card site instead. After Compaq bought DEC and retired the Digital brand, they finally took over altavista.com.
- Tangaroa 14y ago
  It looks like altavista.digital.com and babelfish have "been excluded from the Wayback Machine" so we can't see what they looked like back then unless anyone has kept a screenshot for 15 years or has a book or newspaper with a screenshot in it.
kenrikm 14y ago
If only I had a time machine and a thumb drive filled with a modern web stack. :) for some reason my memory was much more kind to these sites than the reality, except GeoCities.. I remember thinking it looked terrible "back in the day"
foxit 14y ago
Older Amazon.com screengrabs can be found here: http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-timeline.html http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-...
srconstantin 14y ago
I actually miss old-fashioned web design. These old pages look like text, and not much else. But most of what I want to do online is text; I want to read and write. The simplicity is actually an aid to clarity.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I use a very plain style for my personal Web site as its aimed at teachers (educational institutions don't always have recent computers) and students (they tend to use phones for Web browsing). I suspect there is considerable peer pressure on any small company or computer professional to have a Web site that looks 'designed'. Shame really.
  - geoka9 14y ago
    And the problem with those designs is that they constantly evolve to become worse UX-wise. The web is very much gullible to fashion change and, unlike fashion in clothes, there seems to be no safe middle ground (like denim, for example) that would always be relatively the same and never out of fashion. And the low-contrast-looks-beautiful fashion is just plain crazy. Whenever I happen to visit a pretentiously designed web site, I cringe in anticipation of hard to read text and my browser getting jerky when trying to scroll.
- skeptical 14y ago
  Well... hacker news' design looks 2001-ish. I like it. No clutter.
- cageface 14y ago
  I'm pretty tired of all the gratuitous peacocking of web sites too. At this point I wouldn't mind much if all the HTML5 stuff just got tossed in the trash in favor of a simpler stack that made the important things like making CSS layout less agonizing work. I'm sure a lot of us read HN partly because it's so refreshingly unornamented. This drive to make web "apps" has a lot more to do with politics than it does with user experience or good engineering.
jaysonelliot 14y ago
It seems like every 6-12 months, a tech blog will punt with some screenshots from The Wayback Machine and a "look at the old web" article. I'd be very interested in an article that used original screenshots from the time, and some real historical context and insight into the technologies powering the sites and the way people used them. Just going to Archive.org and taking some screenshots is, well, lazy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  It would be quite interesting to see them in the browsers of the time. AFAIK there were very big rendering differences you'd be able to see in, say, IE4 on Windows vs Netscape 4 on Mac.
- cleverjake 14y ago
  its still too new to do that, but the httparchive.org will allow us to do that about the current web in the futre.
sebastianavina 14y ago
I still remember my geocities URI: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664 http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664 I typed it so many times before I understand relative and absolute locations... :(
primigenus 14y ago
"the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML." Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website? Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there, and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?
- cleverjake 14y ago
  Page 29 of Levy's GooglePlex... "The minimalism is that we didn't have a webmaster and had to do it ourselves" - Larry Page
- dkrich 14y ago
  Aren't both scenarios you are describing essentially the same thing?
Swizec 14y ago
Amazon looks essentially the same. In fact, about a year or two ago it looked almost exactly the same. This feels interesting. I wonder why that is ...
- AVTizzle 14y ago
  Hah - came here to same the same. Bezos and Amazon are among the four super-powers of the internet for good reason. I imagine they've run cost/benefit analysis and found the ROI of investing and focusing on any their new frontiers (AWS, Kindle, etc...) to outweigh the ROI of a redesign at this point. But funny all the same :)
- Tangaroa 14y ago
  Some possibilities: * They had good UI designers to start with, so no major changes were needed. * By now the site appearance is part of their brand, so they don't want to change it. * Amazon may now be such a complex site that a change would be expensive. * It's not broken, so there's no need to fix it.
Tloewald 14y ago
It bugs me that the writer opines amazon looks quite modern after using a 1999 page. A lot of the sites listed looked a lot more modern in 1999 than they did in 1997.
TheBoff 14y ago
The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one, and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in such a jump. Is there any layout or designer that a designer wants that they can't create on the modern web? Because there were many they couldn't back then, through the limitations of the browsers, and internet speeds. The next big move, I think, will be to web applications, but I would imagine they will look fairly similar to the desktop (or perhaps iPad) applications we have today.
- rprospero 14y ago
  I think the argument is that looking back and laughing is a fundamental issue of design trends. To put it differently, do you think that people won't look back in twenty years and laugh at today's fashion trends? Fashion design has had a few millenia to mature and we still haven't got it right. It's a little unfair to hold web design to a higher standard.
cwe 14y ago
Anyone else appreciate the irony of the lone Google ads appearing between the description and screenshot of Google's page?
freehunter 14y ago
Microsoft was actually trying – and they would keep developing IE until they released version 6, after which they stopped development, leaving the Web to stagnate. Uhh, apparently I just dreamed that IE7-10 existed. I must have been dreaming that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari existed to keep the web from stagnating. It's a shame that whole web thing isn't around anymore, I'd love to see some foolish commentary on it.
- yahelc 14y ago
  Microsoft waited 5 years (Aug 2001 to Oct 2006) to release IE7. Having defeated Netscape, they basically rested on their laurels and did nothing. Only with the spectre of Firefox did they start even trying again, and only in the last year or so have those efforts even been worthwhile.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    But the claim that the web stagnated because Microsoft stopped developing IE is just wrong. Firefox picked up their slack and put forth some pretty great efforts, far beyond what Microsoft was ever willing to do.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  As if IE7 or IE8 are worth any amount of praise. I'm sure any web developer would agree with that commentary. IE6,7,8 span an immense amount of time and represent a still large base of users that have to be specifically catered to.
noblethrasher 14y ago
I remember snobbishly (but silently) deriding the designs of Geocities (and later Myspace) sites. Now I dearly miss the messy and delightful variety of all that amateur self expression.
tsuyoshi 14y ago
Actually, there was a Google site in 1997, at google.stanford.edu.

48 points by boopsie 14y ago

reiz 14y ago

Haha. Thank you for this post. They look all pretty shitty :-)

magnusgraviti 14y ago

I think these examples show us how much have internet technologies changed and improved.

amac 14y ago
I agree with this - but I'd say the technologies that came later (aka flash) were actually a step backwards.

MikeCapone 14y ago

The one that jumped at me is Amazon. It's the one that has changed least.

sopooneo 14y ago
And, to my mind, looked best of the lot. They had a decent and consistent color scheme whereas most of the rest were all over the map.

ben1040 14y ago

That's not the original AltaVista page - as mentioned by the disclaimer in the screengrab, altavista.com was not related to DEC or the AltaVista search engine. At least when it first opened, it was altavista.digital.com. And that confused people; I'd tell them to go search AltaVista for something and they'd come back confused because they wound up on some e-card site instead. After Compaq bought DEC and retired the Digital brand, they finally took over altavista.com.

Tangaroa 14y ago
It looks like altavista.digital.com and babelfish have "been excluded from the Wayback Machine" so we can't see what they looked like back then unless anyone has kept a screenshot for 15 years or has a book or newspaper with a screenshot in it.

kenrikm 14y ago

If only I had a time machine and a thumb drive filled with a modern web stack. :) for some reason my memory was much more kind to these sites than the reality, except GeoCities.. I remember thinking it looked terrible "back in the day"

foxit 14y ago

Older Amazon.com screengrabs can be found here: http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-timeline.html http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-...

srconstantin 14y ago

I actually miss old-fashioned web design. These old pages look like text, and not much else. But most of what I want to do online is text; I want to read and write. The simplicity is actually an aid to clarity.

keithpeter 14y ago
I use a very plain style for my personal Web site as its aimed at teachers (educational institutions don't always have recent computers) and students (they tend to use phones for Web browsing). I suspect there is considerable peer pressure on any small company or computer professional to have a Web site that looks 'designed'. Shame really.
- geoka9 14y ago
  And the problem with those designs is that they constantly evolve to become worse UX-wise. The web is very much gullible to fashion change and, unlike fashion in clothes, there seems to be no safe middle ground (like denim, for example) that would always be relatively the same and never out of fashion. And the low-contrast-looks-beautiful fashion is just plain crazy. Whenever I happen to visit a pretentiously designed web site, I cringe in anticipation of hard to read text and my browser getting jerky when trying to scroll.
skeptical 14y ago
Well... hacker news' design looks 2001-ish. I like it. No clutter.
cageface 14y ago
I'm pretty tired of all the gratuitous peacocking of web sites too. At this point I wouldn't mind much if all the HTML5 stuff just got tossed in the trash in favor of a simpler stack that made the important things like making CSS layout less agonizing work. I'm sure a lot of us read HN partly because it's so refreshingly unornamented. This drive to make web "apps" has a lot more to do with politics than it does with user experience or good engineering.

jaysonelliot 14y ago

It seems like every 6-12 months, a tech blog will punt with some screenshots from The Wayback Machine and a "look at the old web" article. I'd be very interested in an article that used original screenshots from the time, and some real historical context and insight into the technologies powering the sites and the way people used them. Just going to Archive.org and taking some screenshots is, well, lazy.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
It would be quite interesting to see them in the browsers of the time. AFAIK there were very big rendering differences you'd be able to see in, say, IE4 on Windows vs Netscape 4 on Mac.
cleverjake 14y ago
its still too new to do that, but the httparchive.org will allow us to do that about the current web in the futre.

sebastianavina 14y ago

I still remember my geocities URI: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664 http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/3664 I typed it so many times before I understand relative and absolute locations... :(

primigenus 14y ago

"the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML." Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website? Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there, and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?

cleverjake 14y ago
Page 29 of Levy's GooglePlex... "The minimalism is that we didn't have a webmaster and had to do it ourselves" - Larry Page
dkrich 14y ago
Aren't both scenarios you are describing essentially the same thing?

Swizec 14y ago

Amazon looks essentially the same. In fact, about a year or two ago it looked almost exactly the same. This feels interesting. I wonder why that is ...

AVTizzle 14y ago
Hah - came here to same the same. Bezos and Amazon are among the four super-powers of the internet for good reason. I imagine they've run cost/benefit analysis and found the ROI of investing and focusing on any their new frontiers (AWS, Kindle, etc...) to outweigh the ROI of a redesign at this point. But funny all the same :)
Tangaroa 14y ago
Some possibilities: * They had good UI designers to start with, so no major changes were needed. * By now the site appearance is part of their brand, so they don't want to change it. * Amazon may now be such a complex site that a change would be expensive. * It's not broken, so there's no need to fix it.

Tloewald 14y ago

It bugs me that the writer opines amazon looks quite modern after using a 1999 page. A lot of the sites listed looked a lot more modern in 1999 than they did in 1997.

TheBoff 14y ago

The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one, and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in such a jump. Is there any layout or designer that a designer wants that they can't create on the modern web? Because there were many they couldn't back then, through the limitations of the browsers, and internet speeds. The next big move, I think, will be to web applications, but I would imagine they will look fairly similar to the desktop (or perhaps iPad) applications we have today.

rprospero 14y ago
I think the argument is that looking back and laughing is a fundamental issue of design trends. To put it differently, do you think that people won't look back in twenty years and laugh at today's fashion trends? Fashion design has had a few millenia to mature and we still haven't got it right. It's a little unfair to hold web design to a higher standard.

cwe 14y ago

Anyone else appreciate the irony of the lone Google ads appearing between the description and screenshot of Google's page?

freehunter 14y ago

Microsoft was actually trying – and they would keep developing IE until they released version 6, after which they stopped development, leaving the Web to stagnate. Uhh, apparently I just dreamed that IE7-10 existed. I must have been dreaming that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari existed to keep the web from stagnating. It's a shame that whole web thing isn't around anymore, I'd love to see some foolish commentary on it.

yahelc 14y ago
Microsoft waited 5 years (Aug 2001 to Oct 2006) to release IE7. Having defeated Netscape, they basically rested on their laurels and did nothing. Only with the spectre of Firefox did they start even trying again, and only in the last year or so have those efforts even been worthwhile.
- freehunter 14y ago
  But the claim that the web stagnated because Microsoft stopped developing IE is just wrong. Firefox picked up their slack and put forth some pretty great efforts, far beyond what Microsoft was ever willing to do.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
As if IE7 or IE8 are worth any amount of praise. I'm sure any web developer would agree with that commentary. IE6,7,8 span an immense amount of time and represent a still large base of users that have to be specifically catered to.

noblethrasher 14y ago

I remember snobbishly (but silently) deriding the designs of Geocities (and later Myspace) sites. Now I dearly miss the messy and delightful variety of all that amateur self expression.

tsuyoshi 14y ago

Actually, there was a Google site in 1997, at google.stanford.edu.