Showing all posts tagged: history
Before the Firefox, Opera, web browsers there was Netscape
21 October 2024
Jamie Zawinski, one of the original creators of the erstwhile Netscape browser, recalls the day the first version, Netscape 0.9, was shipped thirty-years ago, last week:
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded.
I started using Netscape, by then known as Netscape Navigator, when I bought my own computer in 1996, meaning I could choose the software I wanted to install.
That was a Windows 95 box, and would have had a version of Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s then web browser offering. But Netscape was all anyone could talk about, so I soon migrated there. I’ve never been a fan of IE, or any Microsoft browser, for that matter. The browser wars of the late nineties left me with a distinct distain for their stuff. I took to using Firefox almost the day it was released, and it remains my default browser to this day.
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So long, thanks for all the blog posts: Microsoft cans WordPad
10 October 2024
Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps?
Before switching to Word, I used to draft all my blog posts in WordPad. Now I use Writer. I did, still do, prep all the text and HTML tags when writing up a blog post, then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. When I migrated to WordPress in 2007, I used WordPad (heh, WP) to set out all the old blog posts from the old static, manually coded HTML webpages, onto an upload template. I later imported the template in the then new database on the WordPress install. So, WP to WP. The whole process took months, and I still look through the file today, which I’ve kept in an archive folder.
I expect the end game, on Microsoft’s part, is to push everyone onto Word. For a subscription.
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blogs, history, technology, trends, writing
Internet Archive Wayback Machine link replaces Google search cache
27 September 2024
Google search does away with its cache, an archived copy of an earlier version of a webpage, but now links to the Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine copy instead. Try it on your own website, assuming it’s indexed by Google that is. On the search result, click the “more about this page” button, which will take you to a page where you’ll see a Wayback Machine link.
You won’t see a copy of every website presently online, or that once was though, as Chris Freeland, writing on the IA blogs page, explains:
This collaboration with Google underscores the importance of web archiving and expands the reach of the Wayback Machine, making it even easier for users to access and explore archived content. However, the link to archived webpages will not be available in instances where the rights holder has opted out of having their site archived or if the webpage violates content policies.
The Google move seems like a much needed — maybe — shot in the arm — maybe — for the IA, which has been struggling of late.
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Google no longer archives cache versions of webpages
18 September 2024
Thomas Germain, writing for Gizmodo:
Nostalgia for a button that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of might seem absurd, but Google’s cache function was a foundational solution to one of the web’s earliest problems. As the web transformed into a more stable infrastructure, cache was mostly abandoned by regular consumers, but it was still a useful tool. SEO workers used it to watch changes made by competitors. Journalists and researchers checked caches to keep an eye on the historical record. Some savvy internet users knew cache was a way to get around paywalls, or as a poor man’s VPN to load websites that were blocked in particular regions.
I’ve not been able to access this feature for some time, which used to accompany search results, and was beginning to wonder what had happened. Google cache, as many referred to it, was also a good way to look at posts or articles that were intended to be online only for short periods of time.
Checking Google cache was always a quick and easy way to look at these sorts of documents after they had been deleted.
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Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix documentary
18 September 2024
Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix produced documentary, trailer, recounts the story of what was meant to be the third Apollo crewed landing on the Moon, in 1970. An exploding oxygen tank in the body of the command module craft, on-route to the Moon, however spelt the end of the landing attempt.
Instead the flight became a desperate race against time to return the Apollo astronauts to Earth before they ran out of oxygen and fuel.
The Apollo 13 flight transcript is well worth listening to. Note how calmly Jack Swigert, followed a few seconds later by Jim Lovell speak, when informing mission controllers on Earth of the situation. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Sounds more like someone saying they’ve missed the bus and will be ten minutes late for work.
American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 docudrama, Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon, is also an excellent recounting of the story.
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Does a court ruling mean no more Internet Archive, Way Back Machine?
11 September 2024
The Internet Archive (IA) has been fighting a number of legal proceedings recently, after making digitised copies of numerous books and novels freely available, through their website. At no point did the IA seek permission from any of the authors involved, nor did they offer them any sort of payment, for copying and distributing their work.
Last week the United States Court of Appeals ruled against the IA, who were seeking to overturn a lawsuit brought against them by a number of publishing houses. The outcome may force the not-for-profit organisation to shut down.
The IA is perhaps best known for the Way Back Machine, a repository of past and present websites. According to the IA, they have archived over eight-hundred-and-sixty billion webpages, including copies of disassociated since 1998.
But websites and books are not all that the IA has taken copies of. TV shows, software applications, and images, are also among their vast collections of digital paraphernalia, much of which is also subject to copyright, as Bryan Lunduke writes:
First and foremost: Has the Internet Archive made, and distributed, digital copies of work you own? This ruling will certainly not hurt your case should you decide to take legal action against Archive.org. And — holy smokes — the amount of copyrighted material on Archive.org is absolutely massive.
Although past versions of my website archived by the IA may constitute them distributing digital copies of my work, I’ve never viewed that negatively. In fact, I’ve always found it useful to have access to earlier instances of disassociated, especially as I didn’t backup all of my old website designs. In my case though, I don’t see the IA’s duplicates of my work as any sort of copyright violation. Rather, I think of these copies as something of a “mirror” of disassociated.
Whether people look up my website via the URL, or the Way Back Machine, doesn’t particularly matter. The content is the same. It hasn’t been altered in any way I’m aware of. Further, as far as I know, the IA isn’t charging anyone to see the archived versions of disassociated, and therefore making money by way of my efforts.
But the Way Back Machine isn’t just there for me to go looking up old versions of my website. It’s also akin to a museum of the internet. A place where we can go and see websites that have long since gone offline, and study the history of the web. To this end, in my opinion, the Way Back Machine serves an important purpose.
The IA’s duplication of novels, and distribution through a “library”, is a different matter entirely. Although some well-known novels are now in the public domain, those published in recent decades usually are not. Copyright laws prevent novels from being duplicated and distributed by unauthorised means. And that’s the way it should be. Consider that many Australian authors earn less than thirty-thousand (Australian) dollars a year. Poets usually make well below ten-thousand dollars. Both these figures are far less than the minimum wage in Australia.
Depriving writers of income by freely copying and distributing their work is plain wrong. I’m really at a loss to understand why the IA pushed ahead with such a program. Equally, I find it hard to believe they thought they were doing the right thing. But what’s truly unfortunate is how the judicial findings against the IA could bring about their end, and that of the Way Back Machine.
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books, copyright, history, novels, publishing, technology
disassociated turns twenty-one again, sort of
6 August 2024
This is — again: sort of — /timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment.
Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the first non-blog inception of this website went online in 1997. But, the oldest, presently published blog post, dates back to Monday 4 August 2003. A post about the Windows Operating System (OS), NT4, that I’d been forced to stop using, after upgrading my then computer.
I had a few nice things to say about Windows OS’s back then, quite the contrast to the present time. Ever since properly rebooting disassociated in May 2022*, I’ve gradually been restoring selected old posts from the early days. The post I wrote twenty-one years ago, predates content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, and was instead written onto a static HTML page.
In 2007, as I was preparing to migrate to WordPress, I spent several months copy and pasting several years of “blog” posts onto a template, I would later upload into my first WordPress database. WordPressing, was the term I used to describe that process. But anyway, there we have it. Twenty-one years (unless I restore even older posts, and there’s one or two), of blog posts at disassociated.
But then again, who doesn’t like turning twenty-one a few times?
* though I’d sort of been back since September 2021.
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blogs, design, history, technology
Sometimes my personal website looks like a bad photo of me
17 July 2024
Stefan Bohacek writing on his Mastodon page:
The problem with redesigning your personal website is that it looks great for about a week, and then you start to hate it.
This is a problem of the ages. In the late 1990’s I’d redesign my websites (I had several back then) every few weeks. Or what felt like every few weeks. The need to constantly update came from the desire to look as good as the other ever-changing personal sites that were around then.
It was also necessary — you understand — to be up with the absolute latest design trends, and apply our own interpretations and variations of them to our websites.
For instance, does anyone remember, or know of, TV lines? See an example here (not my work). TV lines became de rigueur with fad-like ferocity in late 1999 I think. If you didn’t feature at least a few images with TV lines, you were no longer with the times, you were w-a-y behind them.
The notion that a website should be redesigned about every six months began to emerge, perhaps, in early 2000. The idea being some consistency in appearance was desirable, while not lasting forever. It also, mercifully, gave us time to focus on other things. Non web things, among them.
Today, the design of disassociated has barely changed in years. It’s been in a single column “note pad” format since, I don’t know 2009/2010? The “d” logo came along in around 2013. It changes colour now and then. I call the current inception the “fruit salad” logo. It’s been here for two years.
The overall site design feels a bit bare sometimes, but I like to keep things on the minimal side. Pictures — when I post them — are meant to stand out, and not be swallowed up by the design. Otherwise though, I don’t have much time presently to think about whether I like the look or not. It’s a bit busy elsewhere right now, and writing posts is really my main priority.
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blogs, design, history, technology
Spellcheck, autocorrect: the end of Notepad as a simple text editor
11 July 2024
Let’s go back in time. Way back in time.
To about this time in 2000. I had, or was just about, to start my first job as a web designer, at an exciting, multidisciplinary design studio, on Sydney’s trendy urban fringe. Ok: Surry Hills. I’m pleased to say I was headhunted into the role, thanks largely to the then inception of disassociated.
My job title was “coder/designer”, and I still have a copy of my business card somewhere. I was given a large box of them at the time, and asked by one of the directors to distribute them at will. At parties, at the pub, on the bus. Everywhere. To spread word of the studio, of course.
When I went into a meeting to discuss the role, I said I wanted to work to web standards with the HTML I would be coding/marking-up. One of the people sitting in on the meeting, who worked in the development arm of the agency, and whom I’d meet previously through local web design/personal website circles, shook his head at me.
He was on the same page: he too wanted to work with standards, but many projects of the day precluded their use. “Ok,” I said, “In that case, I only want to use Notepad for the code/markup I’ll be writing.” I said that because I didn’t want a bar of the bloated, ineffectual, WYSIWYG web design editors that were then available. Fun fact: I still don’t; I never have.
To that, they agreed. Notepad is one of the few Microsoft (MS) products I really like, and will miss on Linux. It has come bundled with Windows Operating Systems since 1983, and has remained little changed. I coded my first websites in Notepad, and built the WordPress theme you’re looking at now, in Notepad. That’s because Notepad is (was) a simple text editor. Notepad gave it to you as it was.
It doesn’t (didn’t) attempt to autocorrect or spellcheck your work. Imagine trying to markup a webpage, and have the app tell you the <IMG> tag was spelt incorrectly? Notepad left you to decide what was right and wrong. Why does any of this matter? Because I saw code/markup as a craft. I didn’t want some WYSIWYG web design app interfering with my work. If you wanted a text editor with spellcheck and autocorrect functions, there were other options.
Word among them. But now MS has decided to change the script. Autocorrect and spellcheck are coming to Notepad soon. Why, I have no idea, given the features are completely unnecessary. But MS will be MS. I’m surprised they’re not introducing the feature to WordPad, a surely (slightly) more robust word processor than Notepad.
Ironically, I read the news on Daring Fireball, a website with a distinct Apple bent. John Gruber, publisher of Daring Fireball, seems to be all in favour of the move, declaring it overdue:
Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.
The whole thing is though, it’s not wild at all. The absence of these features is precisely what made Notepad so appealing in the first place. No doubt there are simple text editor alternatives for Windows. I’ve found one for Linux. Maybe the autocorrect or spellcheck functions will be a feature of Notepad only on Windows 11, which I won’t see.
Perhaps there will be a way to disable the operation of autocorrect or spellcheck in Notepad. Who knows? Of course, it’s moot point as far as I am concerned. But it is a tad sad to see so profound a change coming to an app that turned out to be quite the life changer for me all those years ago.
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I like your old music better than your new music
3 July 2024
I might say that of U2, whose music I once really liked, especially the stuff they did in the nineties. Achtung Baby. Zooropa. Pop. Even 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. These albums mostly represented their electronic music phase. I’d have them on loop for days at a time.
I drew the ire of friends though who told me I needed to listen to their real work, their earlier stuff. From the eighties. Of course: the eighties. The only decade real music was made, apparently.
But back to U2. I tried to get into their really early stuff, but it wasn’t quite the same, as their… (then) newer stuff. Though I still spin (is that the word I’m meant to use?) New Year’s Day (nothing changes on New Year’s Day…), from time to time, usually in late December. Today though, in 2024 — not 1985, or whatever it was — U2’s more recent music, is worse than their older, nineties, stuff.
Since 2000, nothing by U2 has excited me. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, no. No Line on the Horizon, ditto. Songs of Innocence (remember the iTunes release?), forget it. Songs of Experience, nope. And if I hadn’t have looked it up, I wouldn’t have known U2 released a new album — albeit a re-working of earlier songs — called Songs of Surrender, in 2023.
In contrast, I pre-ordered All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and was outside the music shop before opening, on release day. The guy behind the counter, who (coincidentally) was Irish, and a U2 fan, told me this album was different from their previous three, and would take a few listens to enjoy.
And he was right. I did come to enjoy it. But that was over twenty-years ago. Today though, I barely listen to any U2 (except while writing this). None of it, however, fits into the category of being “gold”, as Nick Heer writes, compared to the new music being recorded by other artists in 2024. A lot of old music might be good, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than contemporary work.
But the bashing of recordings made in 2024 goes on. It’s noise. It’s garbage. It’s getting worse. It’s too easy to make. Whoever said that has obviously never tried to record a song. In any era.
This is the reason I continue listening to Triple J, which predominately plays new and alternative music. It’s an Australian radio station, but I think anyone, anywhere, can stream it. The main point being, it is none of this “hits and memories” stuff. These are the good old days, not some past decade. They’re also more Billie Eilish than Taylor Swift, if that makes a difference.
But look, if you can’t stand today’s music, I suggest you lock yourself away with the songs of, say, the Mama’s and the Papa’s, a sixties act, and whose music is surely “golden age” enough for you. Please do so immediately, so the rest of us can go about enjoying today’s new stuff.
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