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Comment by ethana | Hacker News Reader

look at the source. Something makes me think this will work in Netscape 4.

edit: nope. http://imgur.com/a/Jt38q not really.

edit 2: Here's a HP B-series PA-RISC from my closet running actual vintage NS-4, also no, http://i.imgur.com/tt7AYqj.png (the top window is a search for the term "cat")

Google however, almost still works http://i.imgur.com/kdTd1AU.png ... I give them an A. hn and kernel.org get a security algorithm error, reddit gets an i/o error as does craigslist and yahoo. wiki.c2.com has a perpetual spinner. netbsd here makes me sad to be such a fanboy: http://i.imgur.com/RxedDF6.png

http://gnu.org is totally acceptable, even in Netscape 3! http://i.imgur.com/RImHQjM.png

http://fsf.org errors at an appropriate place: http://i.imgur.com/g8TF8Uc.png but after that is usable.

http://berkshirehathaway.com loads perfectly and looks the same.

I'm not sure this entire stack has been updated since the early 2000s. No SSL/TLS, and check the HTTP headers.

Wow, that was a thorough testing.

c2 recently became obsessed with "federated wikis" apparently due to some unimpressed person threatening to batch-delete the entire site. Unfortunately JavaScript-based solutions became interesting.

I'm mildly curious what would happen if you tried to build NetSurf on that thing. It compiles for AmigaOS and RISC OS...

First let me apologize to the HPUX wizard that will very likely read this for being such a bumbling amateur. Anyway, here I go:

H3:54/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake --version

GNU Make 3.80

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ /usr/local/bin/gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 3.3.1

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$ gmake BUILD_CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc

...

gmake[1]: Entering directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem /makefiles/Makefile.tools:403: /Makefile.gcc: No such file or directory

/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/share/netsurf-buildsystem /makefiles/Makefile.tools:460: /Makefile.pkgconfig: No such file or directory

Makefile:40: /Makefile.top: No such file or directory

gmake[1]: * No rule to make target `/Makefile.top'. Stop.

gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/libwapcaplet'

gmake: * [/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6/inst-gtk/build-stamp]

Error 2

H3:55/raid/hp/netsurf-all-3.6$

Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X to a modern machine as in

$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&

This gives a protocol error. So instead I'm running it all through a vncserver, which uses a more legacy protocol. I've tried things like

$ Xnest -query hp :1

but I get the classic CDE hour glass, a black screen, and nothing more.

It's honestly nice to pull this thing out of the closet just to remember how unfriendly things used to be. You type a command and realize "well gee, this thing doesn't have that. Alright, here's a more painful way..." You don't even get things like arrow keys and backspace for free. Gotta stty them.

I must admit that I would _really_ love to have a go at this HP-UX box. I have some ideas about how to fix the X issues you mentioned, and getting remote CDE working to your normal X display would be awesome too.

To be completely fair, building NetSurf may simply not be possible with the toolchain the machine has - I was maybe-1/3-joking about trying it :P - but it would be an awesome challenge to see if it could be done. I suspect it may just be possible.

I emailed you.

"Looks like some serious effort. To put things in context, I can't do remote X to a modern machine as in

    "$ DISPLAY=desktop:0 xterm&

"This gives a protocol error."

Ok, I'm impressed. That's the first time I've seen that.

I believe it's relatively recent. I've heard second-hand from better men than me that they are dropping a lot of legacy things. As far as I can tell, the HP is running X11R5. It doesn't do -version, the man page is for R5 and the binary is dated "Oct 27 1997" ... so yeah, 20 years ago. It's honestly a reasonable thing to break.

X11R5 is older than I am (and I'm old). Wow.

That would explain it.

Seeing Macromedia's logo really hit me in the nostalgia.

I remember tinkering with Flash back in the day, even before it was Adobe.

Holy crap, I worked on parts of the UI on that site. No idea it was still online.

Really? What years?

I guess it'll stay up as long as it generates revenue via ads. Its still someone's homepage I suspect. The elderly still using AOL perhaps?

I've never wanted to see a revenue graph more than that of Excite. I would suspect there would be a strong correlation with AOL dial-up subscription rates (perhaps causation too).

And if that's not good enough... they have a LITE VERSION. http://lite.excite.com/

Simply making a version of X that loads on dialup is itself a market segment. Clone some popular websites but sacrafice everything.

Also I've long wanted an HTTP caching mechanism that permits cross origin caching, so people aren't redownloading the same dependencies. Essentially the server responds with a digest and if the browser has a match from any domain, it forgoes the download.

Is there a hard to trigger collision attack possible? Sure but I don't care.

Yes, but Excite Lite no longer supports the webmail.

My login/password still works and custom theme is there !

Mine too, as I found out two weeks ago. Excite is back to my primary webmail.

and yet it has a ranking of 8,689 with huge traffic uptick since Jan 17 as per Alexa today .... does that mean people still use it regularly?

Very much so. In a world where Google is watching everyone and Yahoo is getting relentlessly attacked, why not go back to the old standby?

Check the ' Top Concert Tickets' section and performers. Seems mainly for people wanting to stay in a former era, which is not bad as they get something they find useful. Also a fair bit about Home Security, Medical and Nursing, Online Schools and Criminal Justice. I think they have an audience.

Looks like there are doing some 1990's SEO too:

Home Security Systems Arizona

Home Security Systems Atlanta

Home Security Systems Augusta

Home Security Systems Austin

Home Security Systems California

Home Security Systems Cleveland Ohio

Home Security Systems Columbus Ohio

Home Security Systems Dallas...

Crikey, I just saw a DeLorean fly by.

Wow. This page is actually strangely appealing. It loads fast. I don't have to click off to another page to get the news headlines. Ads are restrained to just a couple square boxes.

It's almost like a knock off of a Japanese "portal" except its not but rather its sort of a fossilized 1999, except it has SSL.

And to think they had the opportunity to buy Google for 750K after Vinod talked Page and Brin down from 1MM

Amazing. It even renders more or less decently on mobile.

I'm going to start a new trend in web design. I'll call it 56k design.

Well as long as you still transpile 10MB of es7 to show a paragraph of text and an image, we're all good.

> I'm going to start a new trend in web design. I'll call it 56k design.

That was pretty much my criteria when I was making forum software: https://www.lfgss.com/

It's still too heavy and slow, and there's still some things I could do better. But that's nitpicking, it's pretty good and when I finish re-structuring all of the code it will be a single binary install for those who want to use it, or a split-binary Web-UI + API for those who want to only do certain parts (i.e. customise and host the front-end and not care about the back-end, or to scale the background for heavy mobile use without that being serving front-end traffic).

My goals for that software in the next few months:

1. Same-origin everything

2. Eradicate as much JavaScript as possible (graceful degradation to the extreme)

3. What JavaScript cannot be eradicated, do natively (not using jQuery, etc)

4. Single codebase, single binary install from a single `go install` command

Oh hey, I love the lfgss site design. It just gets shit done and looks decent on everything I own.

We've built the Thredded forums engine (https://thredded.org) with the same goals in mind. The entire CSS is 10KiB, JavaScript loads asynchronously and is optional.

That's delightfully nice to use. Damn good job.

Oh, people have already tried this. Very recently I think someone posted their website on here saying it was amazingly fast etc. Anyone who used the web back in the 90s just remembered it as how things used to be. A Google search was virtually instant over a 56k modem. Now it's noticeably laggy on a broadband connection. If you used Firefox then web pages started rendering the instant enough HTML had been downloaded. None of this waiting for the entire thing and then running over it all with Javascript to generate the "real" render.

It may be a couple of boxes but that link spam is something else, thought I was a domain parked page for a second there.

But that like half a page of link spam loads faster than a single banner ad on most sites.

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