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The Internet

Classic Browsers Given New Life 185

Posted by Hemos from the when'd-the-blink-tag-appear? dept.
randomErr writes: "Recently a new site opened up that shows these youngsters how we had to surf in the old days. Deja Vu.org pulls a given URL and filters out the tags according to what was viewable by your chosen browser. Just for kicks take a look at how Slashdot.org looks on Netscape 0.9 and IE 2.0" Very fun -- the timeline is interesting reading, too. It's like a trip down Memory Lane. Or something.
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Classic Browsers Given New Life More

Classic Browsers Given New Life

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  • I've never fathomed how professional website designers check out their work on, say, IE2, IE3, IE4, IE5 without using 4 different PCs Just curious, anybody out there know how the pro's do it? Or how they run multiple browser versions?!

    Short answer.. we don't! Ok I generalise a lot and some other more professional designers will no doubt give their own answer. But I do get paid and part of my work involves designing html for the web, and I gotta admit I just have a look on the lastest versions of IE and Netscape (which can both be installed on the same PC).

    A lot of sites these days stipulate a minimum browser requirement.

    I use style sheets extensively, and although that means older browsers won't render as I see the pages, it does mean they'll have a pretty good go at making the page readable. The pages have more syntactic meaning and less layout code, which is a "good thing".

  • What a great idea! This could be a whole genre in itself, like classic gaming! Think of the possibilities: Software that slows your computer down so you can see what it would have been like to run Unreal on a 286

    Such software already exists; I don't remember URLs now, but many of the old games are rather unplayable without software that slows things down a bit...

  • I can remember 4 years ago, when I first got on the Internet. I was using my Performa 400 which was ancient as far as everyone else was concerned. I didn't have much money, so I used what I got. I had a 2400 bps modem, then got a 14.4 as a gift from a friend. I had Netscape 2.02. It fit nicely on my 80 meg drive, and into the 8 MB of RAM I had. It worked flawlessly for the most part, and displayed more pages perfectly fine.

    Then I was stupid and I installed IE 3.x, and my system never worked right until I reinstalled MacOS 7.5.5 from scratch.

    I didn't have browser integration, I didn't have active desktop. I had my telnet client, which I used for everything from mail to usenet to lynx on large pages and I had my ftp client.

    I miss those days quite a bit, and this helps me relive them a bit. Regardless of how some people say how good new technology and this and that is good, sometimes simplicity is the best...

    Why did I write this? I dont know, just felt like making an interesting comment on how I used to do things.
  • http://web.cnam.fr/ImageWWW, I think

    I remember all of us reloading the page over and over again from a friends machine (wintermute), so that he would show up on top of the active users list.
  • I remember when you had to go to Jenni's [jennicam.com] house to watch her fuck.

    Kong
    --
  • The internet 10 years ago...wait! Al Gore wasn't Vice President then! How could the internet be around?!?!
  • This is the mirror of one of the early Mosaic demos, showing off multimedia capabilities.

    http://www.totic.org/nscp/demodoc/demo. html [totic.org]
  • IIRC Gopher wasn't a search engine, just a precursor to the WWW. Gopher did have a search engine named Veronica though....
  • Funny how this should be a slashdot article all of a sudden. I use NS 4.6 and iCab pre2.0 alternately, because they both go down in flames fairly often. On both of them I see more and more and more pages that render solid areas of blackness- text that's supposed to be white or something and is being drawn black on black. I am increasingly resigned to the idea that the Web is becoming off limits for me, which is a strange idea for anyone who knows me, as I've usually been the token geek to give computer advice etc. to acquaintances.

    I wish we _could_ go back to NS2 or whatever. The web has never been a very tidy place, but it is becoming almost uninhabitable unless you use IE5, which I refuse to do on principle. If that means I get cut off entirely so be it...

  • Your browser and OS would dance about and sing? Wow... put that in the next Mozilla build!

    --

  • % of Lynx-using public: 0.01%.
  • am I the only one that thinks Slashdot looks better in Mosaic?
  • Cool indeed, but can it convert a website into a Gopher site?
    =P
  • Oh God. I just looked at my website with the Lynx viewer. Ouch. That'll teach me not to substitute paragraphs with line breaks...

    ...back to the markup, time to do some corrections.
  • I know I write simple code, but geez, even in line-mode my site works and is readable. Granted, you don't get that it's in a table until 2.0, but the pages still work. http://www.pdxnet.net/bands/ [pdxnet.net] - Portland, Oregon Bands Pages - since 1998
  • You know, you *can* turn that crap off in Netscape 4.74.

    Losing a great deal of the other HTML features modern sites use would be enough to make me switch immediately (hell, it was enough to make me switch to netscape 2 in '96...)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Last one from me...

    I got my IRQ values muddled up for my modem and my mouse when I got my first modem up and running. It actually worked OK - but only as long as I kept the mouse moving!

    Move mouse - stream of packets!
    Stop moving mouse - no packets!

    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • That is amazingly accurate except for one thing:

    Mosaic 1.0 did not render jpegs. It put an
    NCSA logo box in their place.
  • The URL is right, but the link is wrong.

    Click here [metamatrix.se], or copy and paste it here: http://finnegan.metamatrix.se/dejavu/
    ... or from the parent.

    /nutt
  • There's another mirror up on http://www.goatse.cx

  • IE2 is cool (Score:3)

    by luckykaa ( 134517 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:23AM (#883557)
    Can't beat reading slashdot in black on a black background. Shame the links aren't in black.
  • Well if you really want to know how it was 'in the old days' (TM) you can slide over to Evolt.org [evolt.org] and download your own copy of these ancient browsers. It's much more fun.
  • I rememeber reading a survey on a webdesign site a while ago, asking which screen size people designed for - choices were 600x800, 1024x768, etc - there was no "All screen sizes" option.

    Similarly, as you say, many sites stipulate a browser version/s - this is appalling, as the dejavu site demonstrates.... I've already updated one site I manage which had no <NOFRAMES> option.

    So I guess I was asking more serious designers :-)

    Didn't know you could stipulate install directories for IE, though - whenever I've upgraded it it's just gone off and done its own thing - ie, replaced the previous version - and it refuses to install an older version when a newer version is already installed....

  • I tried to visit CNN.com, but it promptly reloaded and overrode the frames...

    Pray, have you disabled javascript? That usually is enough to put the smack down on web "designers" who think they know what my browser should look like better than I do.

  • Hell, I'm browsing with lynx right now and it's not bad at all... Slashdot loads quick, without all those silly graphics.
  • Amazing how good it still looks in their old browser, eh?

  • Oh my.. (Score:1)

    by BELG ( 4429 )
    And the poor little site is already slashdotted..
  • I was investigating legacy browsers, downloading them as I went. What I found is that IE 2.0 was actually marketted as IE 3.0 to catch up to Netscape 3.0 at the time. I wish I could find that damn URL to prove it ...

    rLowe

    PS> Ain't it ironic that now NS is skipping 5 to go to 6?? Only diff is that NS5 code actually existed, and they just scrapped it.
  • That wouldn't help either, since many of the browser emulators use JavaScript to imitate the functions of various buttons and widgets in the windows. The way they launch is a JavaScript method, even.

    I keep JavaScript turned on -- it enables various web sites to function, both for good and for evil.

  • The French have a saying ... (Score:5)

    by arthurs_sidekick ( 41708 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:03AM (#883566) Homepage
    Don't know if it's because the server is being slashdotted or what, but what I get for both Mosaic and IE 2 is a 500 error ... which means that some things haven't changed *too* much =)
  • I have always wondered if a complete browser emulating site exists. This site may remove HTML tags that were not supported, but no removal of tags does justice to what the newer versions of IE and NS do to pages... it can't be explained by the compiance/non-compliance of these browsers. Things like pixel level space, how the browsers react to buggy code, etc.

    My ideal brower emulation site would return a gif/jpeg that shows the page *exactly* the way it would appear in the browser... including dithering of images and pixel level accuracy. It would be a great tool for those of use who have IE5 and can't get back down the road we came from. ;)

  • Booohooohoohooo, like I care about that, nerd.

    All I want to know is that when I click The Internet I can browse the web and I don't care what a saddo like you has to holler about technical shite that no-one but a bunch of socially inept geeks such as yourself cares about.

    Right, why doesn't the mouse listen to my commands. Better call Microsoft techsupport...

  • > And the poor little site is already slashdotted..

    Or maybe it just wasn't viewable by any of the old browsers.

    --
  • This comment is posted from dejavu, emulating Mosaic. Freaky.. What's a few Karma points for a trip down memory lane. :)
  • well I recommend everybody I know to phone Microsoft tech support for the most trivial of problems, the more revenue that Microsoft can create and the more we can get it to grow, the sooner we can rid the computing world of these whinging nerds who, at the end of the day, are not very clever at all and with luck will be their own downfall. This was all demonstrated by xhost forgetting to mention(meaning he is not intelligent enough to know about) X11 or uucp which precursed tcp/ip(which Andreeson is rightly credited with, by you) as the Internet. Still who cares anyway, luckily Microsoft runs it all now and where is Netscape?!! haha! Please people do what you can to end Linux and promote Microsoft. Rod Munch Leader of the Official Gnome Crashed My PC Fan Club.
  • and it's already slashdotted.

    Makes you wonder which OS it runs, since my connection comes trough without problem, but I just get an 'Internal server error' or something

  • That sounds alot like the ROLM phone system at Virginia Tech. Each dorm room had ONE extension, which included a digital phone and a 19,200kb serial line. You had to enter commands like "c 53223" to connect to another station. It was possible to set up a SLIP connection by connecting to a special connection they set up. This system led to the proliferation of warez BBS's like you wouldn't believe

    Unfortunately, there was no way to connect a real modem to the system to dial outside, and the University only had 2400 baud dialouts. I made a "J-box" which connected to the handset jack and allowed you to connect a conventional phone and/or modem. We were able to get 14.4k dialout that way. (this was in 1992).

  • That takes me back... (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:04AM (#883574)
    Server Error

    This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server's error log.

    This is a lot like Slashdot looks NOW.
    --

  • neither of the links work.

  • I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that...

    For my personal site [dyndns.org], this is the approach I took. I tried doing this with a company site [thejewelers.com], but Netscrape's f*cked-up handling of CSS (even in v4.x, which is inexcusable) necessitated the creation of a second, parallel site that would display acceptably in Netscrape. (How many sites do you know that are perfectly viewable in Lynx, but give Netscrape fits? To see how an HTML 4.01- and CSS1-compliant site looks in Netscrape, try this link [thejewelers.com].)

    Fortunately, a makefile and some sed and awk scripts do the conversion automatically...I still have only one source tree to maintain for the site.

    _/_
    / v \
    (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
    \_^_/

  • Once the /. effect is over, I plan to use this for testing html ...it's a pain to create pages and try to test them using as many browsers as poss....
    I've never fathomed how professional website designers check out their work on, say, IE2, IE3, IE4, IE5 without using 4 different PCs
    Just curious, anybody out there know how the pro's do it? Or how they run multiple browser versions?!
  • The Homepage of Edinburgh Univeristies Computing Department [ed.ac.uk].

    Leading the world in research in Speech technology, Bioinformatics, Cognitive science and other such leading fields - I challenge you to spot any differences between how their webpage renders in Netscape 1.0 and IE 5.5.
  • Amaya is still around nowadays, and is still the w3c's testbed.
  • New life doesn't seem to be an appropriate term. IMHO, Undead might be more fitting. [After all, it doesn't bring them back to life, it just looks that way]

    -={(Astynax)}=-

  • Old browser archive (Score:5)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:28AM (#883581) Homepage Journal
    The other way of doing this of course, is simply to download and install the appropriate browser from the evolt.org browser archive at http://browsers.evolt.org/ [evolt.org].


    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • Well, It's at least open for a while. (Check out this [metamatrix.se]). I guess someone will hide that soon?

    Or at least put up some mirrors.
  • Straight up text mode surfing <& largely unformatted text at that> U. of Syracuse public 'web' servers circa 1989. I think I got rid of my account in '98

    Hey !
    ....remember when All the Gophers in the World meant something?
  • What has the last few years given us?

    IE 5? Worst browser I've ever used (the fact that it doesnt like my firewall has something to do with it)

    Netscape 4.7? Slowest piece of...........

    Mozilla? Don't even get me started

  • Well I wanted an out of the box experience for each OS, and Compaq give us the boxes, so I didn't have to pay :) Oh and they look pretty :)

    (So no, not really, as long as you can keep it all seperate)

  • THe problem with this is you can't have more than one version of IE installed at a time. When I tried to install IE 2.0 to test web pages I'm doing for combatability it wanted to overwrite IE 5.5. P. Meanwhile I have Netscape 2.0, 4.6 and Mozilla M16 all running at once.

    ----

  • Gopher? luxury, we used to have to telnet to the web server to read web pages - using IP addresses only, because we couldn't waste bandwidth by using DNS.

    We used to have to get up at 8:30, half an hour before we'd gone to bed to make sure that nobody else was using the server at the same time.

    As for e-mail, you kids have it so easy; we used to send morse code over the BNC cable and the if recipient could decode it we were lucky..


    Steve
    ---
  • I remember it being on akebono.stanford.edu but don't remember if it was the top level page or /yahoo.
  • Try taking the space out of the broken URL - that breaks the link through my proxy...

  • Does anyone else remember that browser?

    I think it was the last of the "1" series before v2 introduced frames (and tables? - no, I think that was in v1).

    I think I still have the floppys for a Windows 3.1 install for that. It ran really well on my 386DX40...

    I remember the Netscape beta releases - hearing stories about how we couldn't get them in Australia because the servers were too overloaded for mirroring.

    Then, when v1 came out, we figured out a way to set up the destops on the uni machines to use one of the lectures proxys and give us external access, and everyone downloaded it. Ahh.... makes me feel like I've been around for ever, and I'm only 25.

  • IE 2 was a completely different beast than IE3. Install an old copy of Win95 OSR1 or any copy of WinNT 4. Then you'll see IE 2. IE 2, in a word, sucked. IE 3 was MUCH better. It had the integrated Mail/News app that eventually became Outlook Express.

    Actually there's an interesting tidbit about IE 3 that most people don't know. Remember Microsoft Bob? Well, around 1996, the Bob programming team were hard at work for Bob 2.0 for Windows 95 (why? I have no idea), and NS 3.0 had just come out. Microsoft needed a capable browser, and they needed one FAST, because they were pretty much taken by surprise by the explosion of the Internet. Well, ol' Billy G himself walked into the offices where the Bob programmers were and basically said "Stop what you're doing right now. We're scrapping Bob 2.0. Your new job is IE 3.0."

    Six months later... IE3 was born.

    It amazed me how much power he had within the company when I read that.

    Later,
    -Kevin, MCSE+I/MCT
  • I tried to visit CNN.com, but it promptly reloaded and overrode the frames, also making IE 5.5 (my browser) render it. Apparently CNN is one of many sites that forces itself out if loaded in a frameset. I guess it's done to prevent typo sites loading it in a full-page frame, among other things.
  • The old copies of Mosaic were never taken off of NCSA's FTP server You can find them here. [uiuc.edu] This is a little more complete than Evolt.org since it includes the Unix binaries along with source for several versions. Don't forget to pick up your copy of NCSA HTTPD while you're there!
  • Uhm, for the work I've done, I usually design for browsers released by or after 1995. Anyone using technology older than that needs to upgrade. They really are the minority of webbrowsers and it is a waste of resources (time & money) to develop a seperate site for them. Most other web developers I know will agree to this. While we (the wd'sm I know) focus most energy on the mainstream technologies support (CCS, DHTML) in the current DOM versions, a few of us do make an effort to make our sites readable by almost any browerser, even ones with . s suck anyway :P

  • i remember old internet browsers - they were all just fields in those days.

    but really, i remember back in the 70s when all we could do was look up a book to see if it was in some library in California. not much good when you're at uni in england, but hey.

    ---

  • I used Mosaic for a long time, until 1995 or so, mainly because it was the only browser available for DECStations with ULTRIX. But after that I started using Netscape on Sun boxen instead (Tables in webpages! Woohoo!). I just wanted to say that I still think the spinning icon in the top-right corner of the browser should be the one that stops loading the page... I can't remember how many times I clicked on the "N" icon in Netscape and got sent to their homepage, when I just wanted to stop the page loading. After some time of that, I noticed that Netscape had a separate "stop" button, but it took long to get used to.

  • Is it me or are half the /. submissions -- like this one mentioned on other sites first such as memepool kuro5hin (rip), technocrat [technocrat.net], memepool [memepool.com], HNN [hackernews.com] or any of the other countless weblogs? From memepool:
    Monday Jul 31, 2000 Relive the sloth-like speed, nightmarish user interfaces, and new-car smell of the web browsers of yesteryear, at Dejavu.org.

  • hehe (Score:1)

    by vapour ( 102049 )
    Maybe they should put a windows emulator up there, I might be able to type out my CV in word emulation and finish it before the application or the OS crashes.
  • To install differet IEs on windows it's easy: First you install whatever version of windows that comes with IE4 (I belive that it will be Win98). Then you install IE3 16bit version and after this you install IE5. During the installation of IE5 there is an option to install it to different directory and leave currently installed browser working. That's it.
  • I'm not saying that nifty new features in HTML will go away, heck, more will continue to be added. But I often wish my browser had a little toolbar like this to be able to selectively turn off HTML features to make sites produced by overzealous webmasters a little more readable.

    Now, guys, no matter how good an idea this is, do not delay shipping Mozilla for it. We've been down that path... :)

  • assuming they possess a computer that can run the latest browsers of course. if not... well i guess they are out of luck?!
  • Now the big question -- anyone got MacOS X Server or GNUStep to bring this into the 21st century? I got a website that would love to have a functional copy of the very first browser.

    http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/dustydeck

    /Brian
  • and if you continue reading...

    "2000-07-03 The old Digital box has finally been put to sleep, and the service is now runned by a K7/550 running linux and apache."
  • Actually, I have to say that /. looks much better in old-style HTML; the only real problem is that the primitive HTML formatting tends to make it look a bit garbled up top. Actually, I might just add a graphic to my own web pages... they're almost pure text and won't break on anything at all (though the odd graphic is a jpeg). Mosaic-enhanced? I wish... /Brian
  • If you don't have the ability to do this there are general rules to follow as to what version of a browser supports what and how well. Most of that information can be found on the web, if not on netscape.com & microsoft.com.

    Is there something wrong with following these rules [w3.org]? Or these [w3.org] if you're concerned about compatibility with older browsers? (Or even these rules [uci.edu], but that's taking things a bit too far...)

    Then again, I'm an old fogey who remembers the days when the point of HTML was to allow the browser to render content according to the terminal's capabilities and user's preferences, not to specify the text font and exact pixel location of each image. Bah! Humbug!

  • I remember on one BBS there was a fellow who wrote long humourous messages who used the slug-like 300bps modem speed to good effect. When he wanted to create suspense, he would put a bunch of characters out like this:

    * * *

    And of course they would glide out, space by space, and you would feel a delicious anticipation as you awaited the upcoming punch line.

    It was almost sad to go to 1200 baud and lose the effect.

    Almost.

    D

    ----
  • Like this, only centered (which Slashdot won't let me do, the spoilsports!):

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I forgot that HTML compresses large numbers of spaces. Funny how life has changed.

    D
    ----

  • Allow between 5 and 10 times more effort to develop a decently cross-browser page, rather than nice simple CSS.

    I can imagine. I'm using Netscape 4.74 myself, and I've been pretty fed up with it, but actually, it has been IE3 that has caused most of my problems, especially font size handling. One of my pages has a comment on the top saying IE3 users should turn off their stylesheets.... The ultimate goal is of course to make my pages as accessible as possible [w3.org], so the usual response to Netscape's CSS trouble has been to drop sophistication. I am quite sure my pages (at least those I wrote since RTFM) are very accessible, especially since turning off stylesheets isn't a big thing. One difficulty is not only making sure the pages are readable on todays top browsers, but also on any future stuff, voice browsers, PDAs, hell, I bet that if people had written good HTML instead of tag soup, I would have had full web on my cell phone by now, and WAP-crap would never have emerged... :-)

  • What I find rather strange is that even though Mosaic has been sitting around basically embalmed for the last four years the licensing restrictions still haven't changed. I don't really get this. Does this have something to do with Microsoft's licensing/theft of Spyglass code, or is it simply inertia?

    /Brian

  • Re:Is this legal? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shut up.

    and stop letting lawyers run your life.

  • I think it's more than just slashdotted - it's slashdotted trying to run one of the much larger, badly-designed pages on the web through a cgi script. :)


    ===

  • I Don't Need This Website. (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @03:43AM (#883621) Journal

    I still have Netscape 0.96 installed on my machine. I use it for testing purposes. I figure that if my pages display OK on that, they will display on anything. Also, it's good to see that your NOFRAMES and NOSCRIPT tags are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.

    I tried /. with it just now. It displayed for a minute, then the browser GPF'd. You can't get much more authentic than that!

  • Nice timeline (haven't been able to get the emulator going yet), but it incorrectly identifies the first web client as a command-line one, and the first graphical client as Mosaic.

    As someone who was lucky enough to try the original browser, probably within days of its release, I find this annoying. :-)

    Check out this web page http://www.w3.org/People/Ber ners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html [w3.org]
    or this nice screenshot: http://www.w3. org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c .gif [w3.org].

    Note that this wasn't just a browser -- it was a "Browser - Editor!" Very advanced for its time, eh?

    (sorry...its just always ticked me off that credit isn't given where it's due on this one...)

    david.

  • I tried viewing Slashdot in NCSA Mosaic 0.9, and was able to pull up an article. In Threaded mode, which uses mostly standard UL and LI tags to represent messages, it was surprisingly readable. However, when I changed my settings and clicked "Change," I was presented with the comments rendered entirely in... my current browser, IE5.5!

    Guess it doesn't do forms just yet.
  • Impressively comprehensive archive.

    My favourites at the time they were released were Cello (developed at Cornell Law School) and Wollongong's Emmisary.

    Cello (the first graphical web browser) was impressive in that it emulated a terminal window right in the browser window, so if you clicked on a telnet: URL you'd go right into your shell account.

    Emmisary was a revolutionary GUI development that worked much the same way Windows Explorer does with Active Desktop. You could telnet, read newsgroups, email, ftp, or manage local files all from the browser window. Unfortunately Wollongong was bought out by Attachmate for its technology who then abandoned Emissary as a seperate product in the face of MS releasing IE for free.

    Another important browser in the development of the web was SlipKnot, that let Windows 3.1 users piggyback on Lynx running through a shell account, in case their ISP didn't provide or charged extra for SLIP/PPP accounts.


    Help [206.253.208.199]
  • We operate the service from sweden, where lawyers don't have nearly as much power as in the US, so hopefully we won't run into trouble, but if we do we'll deal with it then.
  • It is possible to have both IE5 and IE4 installed on the same machine, and it is very easy to install multiple versions of Netscape.

    For the site I just finished creating (not allowed to link to it until officially open) the minimum browser requirement ended up being IE4 + Netscape 3, but it also would work in near-perfect fashion on older browsers (no javascript). The testing for the site was done on 3-4 different machines. I had access to a machine with IE 4 + IE 5 + Netscape Latest, another with IE @ (NT), another with IE 3 + Netscape 3.

    If you don't have the ability to do this there are general rules to follow as to what version of a browser supports what and how well. Most of that information can be found on the web, if not on netscape.com & microsoft.com.

    Another choice people will tell you is that it doesn't matter and that everyone who can't see your site should upgrade to the latest version. But do you really want to turn away the people looking at your site and tell them to upgrade?

    Devil Ducky
  • This is a bit divergent from the topic, but I found a very usefull aspect of this tool:

    Finding web bugs! Those 1x1 pixel images show up everywhere now! Well, at least they do when I'm using Mosaic 1.0
    Jump to http://www.cnn.com with the mosaic emulator and right on the top, upper right hand size is a small blue square. Gottcha.

  • We had to browse the web on pure text-based browsers that still took five hours to start up! And we had to manually type in our links and we liked it! And when we got to an interesting site, our browser and OS would crash on us and dance about on our desk and sing hallelujah!

  • hmm (Score:3)

    by vavenger ( 177469 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:06AM (#883655)
    Y'know, DJ Delorie (http://www.delorie.com) has a bunch of stuff like this thing.

    Here's the Lynx viewer [delorie.com].
    The Purifier [delorie.com]
    and the Compatibility Viewer [delorie.com].
  • Poor thing can probably only handle three or four simultaneous users, what with being a CGI and all. And probably one in an interpreted scripting language at that.

    Maybe in two or three weeks when the story is sufficiently hard to find in the /. archives it'll be possible to have a look at it.
  • Those rules are fine and dandy, but realistically worthless. You can't write an entire site under those standards and honestly expect both Netscaspe and IE to follow them, unless you're not using anything more difficult then <IMG>.

    It's gotten so bad, that I found a protocol that was made it into HTML 4.0, was requested by Netscape, was not supported in Netscape 4.72, but was supported in IE 5+. I don't remember what it was but I do remember it had to do with image maps.

    Devil Ducky

  • Since the original site's being /.'ed. Here's a mirror to it.
    http://finnegan.metamatrix.se/dejavu/

  • Re:Oh my.. (Score:3)

    by BELG ( 4429 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:09AM (#883663)
    There is a mirror on http://finnegan.metamatrix.se/dejavu/emulator.htm that seems ok for now ;)

  • Hell, this ain't THAT old.. (Score:3)

    by BilldaCat ( 19181 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @03:28AM (#883674) Homepage
    IE 2.0 still comes with Windows NT doesn't it? At least that's what the PDC here @ work is running.. :)

  • What about the home page of Berkshire Hathaway [berkshirehathaway.com]? The company was founded by Warren Buffett, who preceded Bill Gates as the nation's richest person. Their stock trades [yahoo.com] at over $50,000 per share, and they still can't hire anyone who knows HTML.

  • Re:Ugh (Score:2)

    by TBC ( 11250 )
    There are many good reasons to still use a text-based browser. Many times I want to grab something from freshmeat or search on Deja when I'm at a Linux box without X. It is also great for the visually impared. (My wife is VI, so I know from experience) If your site can't be viewed from within Lynx, you're cutting of a not insignificant portion of your market. Plus, I don't have to look at all the damn banner ads.

  • Other, similar trips down memory lane (Score:3)

    by Elvis Maximus ( 193433 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:10AM (#883689) Homepage

    What a great idea! This could be a whole genre in itself, like classic gaming! Think of the possibilities:

    Software that slows your computer down so you can see what it would have been like to run Unreal on a 286;

    Mailing lists with aficionados of poor reception advising each other of the exact settings to use to make cable reception on popular models of television look like the signal is coming into a bent coathanger jammed into the back of the TV;

    Petitioning supermarkets and other grocery stores to be open only from 9-5, like in the old days.

    The possibilities are limitless!

    -

  • Still Good (Score:3)

    by CesiumFrog ( 41314 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:10AM (#883690)
    I don't get it. I'm still using Netscape 1.2N

    (It has nntp and everything - except the buggy features such as javascript!)
  • 2 years ago, when I went to college, I had to say goodbye to my P75 and hello to my parents Mac LC, at least until I got my PIII at the end of my freshman year. It was like a trip down memory lane then, as I looked up web pages using browsers and such that took advantage of the 40 Meg hard drive (now much larger) and the 256 color display (still stock), and as I played games such as Lode Runner, that would fit on the drive. People seemed amazed that I got all of that onto 40 Megs of space, and could do just about everything that anybody else could do (albiet Quake wasn't one of those things) with my old Mac.

    It was a fun experience, looking back. Still, it would have been fun to have the PIII at the start of freshman year.

  • Re:Back then... (Score:4)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:11AM (#883692) Homepage
    Grizally Guru mode on:

    Web browsers? Pah! Back in my day, we had to use Gopher! Gopher i say! And if we found a file that was more than 100k in size we used to weep like little girls! Our email would takes days to arrive. Sometimes it wouldn't arrive at all! And that's how we liked it!

  • ok, moving to a new server. (Score:5)

    by noa ( 4909 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:12AM (#883695) Homepage
    Ok, i'm moving it to a new server now. The thing
    is that we (dejavu.org) got sponsored with a
    very nice (8 years old or so) hardware from digital. Very nice, but doesn't handle load
    very well. I'm moving over the site to a (somewhat
    faster) linuxbox that should be able to handle
    the slashdotters somewhat better. For those
    of you who doesn't want to await the dns synching
    the address is http://finnegan.metamatrix.se/dejavu/ [metamatrix.se]

  • But if you're thinking of using this to check web page accessibility, check out the Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer [delorie.com] instead.

  • It seems to me that the Dialectizer [rinkworks.com] got in trouble some time back for letting people run URLs through a filter like this. Could these guys get in the same trouble?

    --
    Il vaut mieux avoir l'air sans l'effet que l'effet sans l'air.

  • Re:ok, moving to a new server. (Score:3)

    by noa ( 4909 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @02:15AM (#883720) Homepage
    oops, borken link. it should be here [metamatrix.se]
  • Sorry guys I still love my lynx

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