HTML in the 90s Options

[Nir]

HTML looked differently back when CSS was not yet invented and stabilized.

Tags and attributes were added to the language to extend it with styling features.

Check out this video to learn how this used to look like and more about the history of HTML:

Link to HTML in the 90s video

[Darin McGrew]

I was working at Sun Microsystems when everyone started talking about "that Mosaic thing". Back then, we didn't even call it the web, or the World Wide Web. And the IT department was trying to figure out how to charge departments for the excess bandwidth consumed by employees using the Mosaic browser.

[Nir]

I was working at Sun Microsystems when everyone started talking about "that Mosaic thing". Back then, we didn't even call it the web, or the World Wide Web. And the IT department was trying to figure out how to charge departments for the excess bandwidth consumed by employees using the Mosaic browser.

Nice 😂

Though the web was pretty light back then, did it still result in high amounts of bandwidth? was it over the phone modem?

[Darin McGrew]

Though the web was pretty light back then, did it still result in high amounts of bandwidth? was it over the phone modem?

I suppose it could have been used over a modem using Lynx, but I don't recall any of my coworkers using it that way. Everyone was using Mosaic, which supported inline images. By today's standards, the external bandwidth wasn't much. And we certainly used plenty of internal bandwidth with NFS, email, and other tools. But compared to the miniscule external bandwidth that we had been using, "that Mosaic thing" used a lot of external bandwidth.

My guess is that most of our external bandwidth before that was for things that didn't have to be done in real time (e.g., USENET and email). The big change with "that Mosaic thing" was that it was done in real time, like FTP requests, only using much more external bandwidth than we had ever used for FTP.

[Nir]

Though the web was pretty light back then, did it still result in high amounts of bandwidth? was it over the phone modem?

I suppose it could have been used over a modem using Lynx, but I don't recall any of my coworkers using it that way. Everyone was using Mosaic, which supported inline images. By today's standards, the external bandwidth wasn't much. And we certainly used plenty of internal bandwidth with NFS, email, and other tools. But compared to the miniscule external bandwidth that we had been using, "that Mosaic thing" used a lot of external bandwidth.

My guess is that most of our external bandwidth before that was for things that didn't have to be done in real time (e.g., USENET and email). The big change with "that Mosaic thing" was that it was done in real time, like FTP requests, only using much more external bandwidth than we had ever used for FTP.

Got it, interesting

[Christian J]

I didn't get (consumer) Internet until 1998 or so. At first I used a 28kbps phone modem, which worked fairly well when viewing lighter pages. But by that time there were already lots of "designer" sites filled with bloated HTML code, such as layout tables nested ten levels deep and with lots of FONT elements and transparent "spacer" GIF-images. Holding the mouse at the ready while waiting for such pages to load could result in quite a bit of wrist strain.

To minimize ISP bills I used to open lots of pages at the same time, so I could read them offline once they had finished loading, but all these browser windows in turn made the PC run out of RAM and become extremely sluggish.

[Nir]

I didn't get (consumer) Internet until 1998 or so. At first I used a 28kbps phone modem, which worked fairly well when viewing lighter pages. But by that time there were already lots of "designer" sites filled with bloated HTML code, such as layout tables nested ten levels deep and with lots of FONT elements and transparent "spacer" GIF-images. Holding the mouse at the ready while waiting for such pages to load could result in quite a bit of wrist strain.

To minimize ISP bills I used to open lots of pages at the same time, so I could read them offline once they had finished loading, but all these browser windows in turn made the PC run out of RAM and become extremely sluggish.

😂 You could also just download to the hard disk. Didn't the browser cache the pages though? I think internet explorer saved the offline pages on your drive so when you visited again it would save bandwidth

[Christian J]

😂 You could also just download to the hard disk. Didn't the browser cache the pages though? I think internet explorer saved the offline pages on your drive so when you visited again it would save bandwidth

True, but while the pages first loaded you had to keep their windows open. Of course, ideally you could just load a single page at the time in the background while reading the previously opened one, but since links on pages often branched out in all directions -- and you didn't know which of them to continue with -- you were often tempted to open them all.

[Nir]

😂 You could also just download to the hard disk. Didn't the browser cache the pages though? I think internet explorer saved the offline pages on your drive so when you visited again it would save bandwidth

True, but while the pages first loaded you had to keep their windows open. Of course, ideally you could just load a single page at the time in the background while reading the previously opened one, but since links on pages often branched out in all directions -- and you didn't know which of them to continue with -- you were often tempted to open them all.

oh ok that makes sense 😂