Adam Norwood

Tag: nostalgia

  • Earliest Web Browsers

    Ars Technica has up a history article on the early web browsers, a rare glimpse into the largely-forgotten software that beat NCSA Mosaic to the punch but didn’t quite make it into pop culture consciousness (seen above is ViolaWWW, notable for early stabs at browsing history, bookmarks, styles, and even embedded scripting — probably also the first web browser I remember using on my Slackware copy of X Windows circa 1994! </old>).

    For all of the developments in web technology since 1991, it’s remarkable to see how many UI features and browsing concepts emerged almost immediately and are still with us today.

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  • The Deleted City

    The Deleted City, an installation that lets visitors explore the virtual ‘homesteads’ of Geocities.com, the most popular gathering place on the 1990’s WWW. For those not familiar, the site made it easy for the average person to set up a basic website (tacky graphics and all), and then group it into a ‘neighborhood’ based on the site’s presumed subject matter.

    The installation is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.

    In full view, the map is a datavisualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing invididual html pages and the images they contain. While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played.

    I love the choice of music for this demo video.

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  • Lucasarts Adventurer

    OMG OMG, some kind soul is posting good-quality, full-page scans of all of the old LucasFilm Games / LucasArts Adventurer magazines! Created at the company’s artistic height, these gems were half retail catalog, half inside scoop trivia treasure trove, decked out with never-to-be-seen-again Steve Purcell art (including single-page Sam & Max comics parodying the major Lucas game release featured that issue). They now sell for an arm and a leg on eBay.

    I used to have every one of these, but they all vanished to whatever corner of the landfill my triangular Day of the Tentacle box and Dial-A-Pirate wheels ended up in…

    (Via MixNMojo)

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  • Stop Motion “Pinball Number 12”

    I’m not sure how I feel about the minor key version of the song (hard to beat the Pointer Sisters original), but…OMG STOPMOTION PINBALL NUMBER COUNT!

    OnetwothreefourFIVEsixseveneightninetenELEVENTWELVE!

    (Via Make)

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  • Lucasfilm Games Tv Humor Video

    If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!

    (Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)

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  • MS-DOS Turns 30

    Happy 30th birthday, MS-DOS. Thanks for all the memories, whether they were extended, expanded, highmem, or in UMBs.

    Sure, you were cobbled together from various other x86 OSes, had features that often felt bolted on, and were scheduled to be “dead” in 1987 (see: OS/2, which Microsoft actively helped develop and then subsequently torpedoed), but you’re somehow still with us today in Windows 7, at least in virtual machine emulation form.

    (Pictured above, the OEM box for MS-DOS 3.2, probably from the era when I first started playing around on our AT&T 6300. Photo credit: unknown, but not for lack of trying…)

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  • olduse.net Brings Back Usenet from 30 Years Ago

    Screenshot from an interesting project, olduse.net ― Usenet posts reappearing in realtime as they did exactly 30 years ago, a new way of experiencing the history of the early Net. See how things were mere months before the launch of B-News, long before the Great Renaming and the creation of the alt.* hierarchy, and best of all, the introduction of spam is more than a decade away still!

    You can use either the browser-based client to poke through the messages, or point your favorite NNTP client to the site and experience it as you would the real Usenet. Nice!

    Also, I like this answer from the FAQ:

    Can I post to olduse.net?
    Your posts will be accepted, but will not show up for at least 30 years. 🙂

    (Via Waxy Links)

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  • RIP Macho Man

    RIP Macho Man. Few people exemplified the XTREME!!!! 1990s marketing aesthetic quite so well.

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  • IBM 2250 Graphics Display

    The IBM 2250 graphics display, introduced in 1964. 1024×1024 squares of vector-based line art beamed at you at 40Hz, with a handy light pen cursor. Much more handy than those older displays that just exposed a sheet of photographic film for later processing!

    (Via Columbia University, via Ars Technica’s recent quick primer on computer display history)

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