Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/what-popular-websites-looked-l.html
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Great post, lotta memories. The Well! Now no one has to worry how the page will load for a V.32 modem user 
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Limited font choices? Why, my 128k Mac came with over a dozen. Granted, that’s not a lot, and it did include Cairo, but those were only the free fonts built-in. The 90s we’re 5-10 years later, and by then we had Truetype.
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Aside from the rounded corners, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising to see that the 2001 Apple design (https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/apple-2001) looks like a preview of the bands, boxes and expanses of white space that have become so familiar today in designs. A few max width media queries for those boxes and it could be mobile friendly too.
Put another way: the Apple site shows how remarkably little the our collective web design imagination has changed in the last 17 years.
My crappy homepage was soooo advanced at the time, it was featured on the host’s landing page as an example of what could be done. Enjoy, my page has not changed in over 20 years.
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I feel so old. Also so nostalgic for the days when I could charge a big hourly rate just to build Web sites like those with just HTML and javascript.
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Was everything really pixelated like that? It’s so horrible.
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Images were a last resort for information conveyance and, when they were used, they were maxed out at 72dpi and 256 colors. You had to built for ssslllooowww connections.
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And we liked that way… Now get off my lawn. 
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Perhaps the wackiest thing I can recall is when ATI’s website had some kind of VR thing where you could wander around the different sections from an FPS perspective. Fortunately they had the insight to make that interface optional.
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Any one of which might be supported by a client’s web browser, if you were lucky.
Mostly we just had to code with the expectation that we couldn’t reliably specify web text beyond “serif or sans serif.” Unless of course we were using images as text for headlines.
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…and nobody’s personal website was cool unless it had a few of these.
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Put another-another way, Apple realized first that a website is little more than an advertisement for you top product, plus a few more, and then some other junk if you really want to dig. Once full-res photos became feasable, this sealed the deal. This presaged what the corporate or sales-oriented website now is quite brilliantly, and of course the CMS’s that have trickled down to every mom and pop e-commerce site have followed suit.
There’s still a lot of creativity out there, but with phones dominating, there’s not much you can do. Are you longing for the days of Flash sites?
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Is this the questions to be asked thread?
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I will only mourn the loss of Homestarrunner when flash finally gives it’s death rattle but I hope they can update it all to html5.
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Flash did suck, but there was a lot of content made for it. I’m perpetually annoyed that it’s such a pain to access those old games and toons. (That goes double for old Unity games.)
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I am actually nostalgic for this. There was a brief time when most websites existed because one individual cared enough about something to write it up and put it online themselves. That really doesn’t happen anymore. No one has a personal homepage, ever. The closest thing is a blog, and those are still pretty rigid in their format and so focused on the latest content that it can be difficult to find anything but recent posts. Everyone else just has social media accounts.
I miss when you could google something and the top results were people sharing their opinions on it, not companies trying to sell it.
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I used to set my browser defaults to not load images, just so I could get to all the juicy juicy content-- by which I meant, words.
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To me, Amazon and eBay haven’t changed all that much. Sure we’ve ditched the “3D” rectangles around frames, but it all looks like junk – “welcome, here’s an indecipherable mess for you to figure out. If you’re new here, you’ll find a usability learning curve, and if you’re not, at least you probably have some ideas how to navigate this rubbish heap.”
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