The 88x31 GIF Collection | Hacker News Reader

The 88x31 GIF Collection

cyber.dabamos.de

496 pointskaeruct124 comments

This takes me back to the days of forum signatures, planetrenders.com, pixel fonts with 1px strokes, making emoticons (not emojis) on deviantArt, BBCode and making long-winded posts on VBulletin/PhpBB boards with the top three posts "reserved for later use".

Man I wish I could go back.

"Under Construction" images, rotating skull and fire GIFs...

http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Flaming logo... spinning logo...

Original context: https://youtu.be/3LkQrtCIFA4

> pixel fonts with 1px strokes

Nostalgia kicked in hard.

Userbars!

I completely forgot about them! Just looked at a bunch of them, they (and forum signatures in general) were kind of awesome.

Oh mannnnnnnnn yes. I forgot about those.

I too miss those days.

What's stopping us?

We're all older and we need reading glasses now? ;-)

I used to "hand-craft" HTML. Literally, writing it and no templates so each page is unique. Gallery page was manually updated.

If I kinda deeply think about it - I post may be one post every 2 months. Why the hell do I need a blogging CMS or static site generator, etc? Just craft a HTML page. You can just write it by hand. #header_h1 ...is it that much more work to write <h1>header_h1</h1>? Especially, every once in 2 months!? Each blog post would be custom. And AWESOME and set in stone. "What if I need to update the header on every single page?" Just don't. No need to update the theme ever. It's like writing a hand written letter, once you put the ink down, it's done. Mail it.

I've been doing this for a while and it's great. If you know a few tricks (optional closing tags, for example), writing HTML by hand can actually be rather pleasant. Go for it!

I used to copy html from the previous page and then modify as necessary.

Overtime it evolved and got cooler! But, there was no need to go back and update old posts.

I think charm about this is severely underrated as seen by the downvotes.

Some people still do this. http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/

Some surprisingly large tech companies still to this.

I don't even disagree, but even people who couldn't get "What if I need to update the header on every single page" out of their heads just embraced framesets and "server-side includes aka shtml" (and the early highly-limited css) and called it a day. Without CMS etc

Yeah, I am not condoning writing HTML for most things, but for a personal blog where creativity is probably the top thing that matters, it's funny how tightly bound our thinking gets. Sometimes, I just sit back, step out and completely dismantle the status quo.

You'd probably enjoy this collage of GeoCities vibes:

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Unlike Geocities, that site is a masterful work of design! (And the wayback machine links are broken today due to a planned power outage.)

Wow, that's really cool!

What I want to know is, how did people make all those amazing 3D rotating animated gifs back then?

Did they use 3d modeling software?

Popular shareware proggies like "Xara3D". Don't think they'd qualify as modeling software. They had basic rotate/translate/scale transform routines in them plus glitzy effects.

(Note "shareware" usually meant cracked as far as youthful hobbyist website building from basements and bedrooms was concerned.)

There were some people who made 3D animated gifs of diverse subjects for a living (e.g. The Animation Factory). I am sure they used real 3D modelling, animation and rendering software for that.

Wow this is gorgeous.

You know what's interesting? You are not alone. Something Awful forums still have most of these things and people are even paying for that in the year 2021 :D

That's still around? I don't even remember my username.

Deviantart? Seems you're in the wrong millennium? Deviantart started in 2000 and at that time I fondly remember us making fun of 90s web design by creating mock sites with 88x31 graphics. In -97 I remember it being all the rage though. :) Three, four or five years may not sound like a lot of time, but the web was changing at a pretty rapid pace back then.

88x31s were still alive and well on early deviantART: https://www.deviantart.com/fractalmbrown/art/Baby-deviantART...

Yes! This is how I got my start in design. So many Photoshop tutorials that started with Render Clouds. Haha!

And then you had like ps 3 and the effect in the next step required version 4 or something

clouds -> difference clouds a few times -> invert -> ctrl+L and compress = lightning is still a recipe in my muscle memory.

Ha, exactly!

Can't forget albino black sheep and homestar runner!

BALEETED

Post reserved for future use.

For those who may be wondering why 88x31px?

https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-odd-size-of-88x31-become-a...

>> At this point in time the largest provider of personal hosting was GeoCities. In order to improve brand awareness, they required that all free hosting users have a link back to GeoCities somewhere on the page. They helpfully provided default banners for these links at - you guessed it - the dimensions of 88x31

But that doesn't really explain why 83x31 was chosen by Geocities

"why one place picked something" doesn't require special reasoning like "why everyone picked something" does.

I know, but I was hoping for something like "you could fit 4 of the buttons in a browser window, on a 640x480 screen" (the standard of the time)

I'd say 800x600 was more prevalent in 1995. You could get real 60 Hz in this mode on most monitors, which looked much better on a CRT than lower refresh rates. Cheap VGA cards could not pull this trick at 1024x768, though, and it flickered painfully.

It fit the font they chose. The designer probably didn't care how many pixels were in the image so long as it looked ok on their screen.

Still not explaining "why", but Wikipedia suggests that it was part of a list of standardized sizes, this one being a "micro bar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner#Standard_sizes

It probably became a standard after it got popular.

My guess is that the creator of the first image didn't have an exact size in mind so when they were doodling in the bitmap editor it just happened to come out to that size and was trimmed accordingly. And then future images were made to fit.

https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html

Why 88 by 31, anyway? Who started this? A Quora poster speculates GeoCities started this trend when they provided 88x31 GeoCities buttons for their users, but the contemporary source she references actually says the trend was started by Netscape.

I also associate that button very strongly with Netscape. I was surprised to not see one which had the Netscape logo on it, only a "Netscape Now" button was there among other "Now" buttons.

I wonder if the 31px height was from the height of the logo on the right of the address bar, the one which was animated. I don't know which height it was, but it could match.

The GIFs are displayed alphabetically by filename, and are paginated. The "N" files show up on the third page:

http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/index3.html

and it links to the "related question" https://www.quora.com/Around-when-did-the-88x31-for-website-...

which seems like an AI misinterpretation of the question, as it goes back to the prehistoric

Fair warning: Page 1 transfers about 8.3MB with 1,000+ HTTP requests. And will likely bring back memories of the 90s.

So... on par with any modern website (minus the 90s)?

As theandrewbailey said, it would absolutely benefit from HTTP/2 - it took about 30 seconds to complete on my fast cable connection on a laptop.

And with higher latency it’s even worse: from Australia, latency to the server was over 350ms (going the long way round, via the USA, for some reason), and it took 80 seconds to load. With HTTP/2, it could have taken as little as two seconds to load, and I’d expect it to take less than eight seconds.

Imagine loading this page in the 90s though! One new HTTP connection at a time, a full TCP handshake. Maybe if you were lucky you were using Netscape which would load up to 4 resources at once!

8MB would take all night on my 2400 baud modem.

We were hacking back then too.

pipelining:true

(Not really a hack, but a lesser known optimization)

I remember enabling this in Firefox. Why wasn't it the default?

I believe they had reports of popular transparent proxies that broke with it set, and the users involved typically weren't in a situation to not use those proxies.

This is of course why we now have QUIC now, and why it's explicitly designed to be as opaque as practically possible to middleboxes.

I saw the slow loading of the page, and it made me confident that Hacker News will take it down soon enough.

This site would benefit greatly from HTTP 2.0, but it's kinda cool to see each banner load one after another.

Or even more, data: URIs.

The authentic 28.8k modem experience.

Some do fail to load for me, yet they then do load when I right click them to open them in a new tab.

Yeah, the speed at which it loaded definitely brought back that 90s feeling.

Loads as fast as modern YouTube.

I was surprised to not find any X10 ads in there, but I guess they just never did small GIFs. Some of their examples from back in the day http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html

Interestingly all of those images seem to be for their camera products. But long before those, X10 sold remote control systems that switched devices on/off over in-home electrical wiring (using the independent X10 protocol). The reliability of these systems were pretty bad as I recall. They offered something like 16 channels with various management devices that allowed for complicated scheduling of device switching.

Heh, I remember those. I had my first internship around that time and one of the made-up jobs my boss at the time had me do was look into those switches. Another intern told me he just wanted someone to look into it since he wanted to try using them on his own home. :)

X10 was the first real home automation standard. The protocol was subject to interference and poor propagation, and did not use any EDAC or acknowledgement so it was pretty unreliable. It was still pretty useful for some things, and X10 devices are still being sold.

The technology may have been fine. The advertising was insanely ubiquitous, in a way rarely seen since. Maybe Evony?

Those ads were annoying enough that Kompressor wrote a song about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs

Given X10's sort of prominent history in the home automation world and its relationship to a lot of reputable companies, I'm really curious what the story is of how X10 Inc itself went for such a sketchy advertising campaign. X10, the protocol, was heavily backed by major home technology companies like Ademco (now Honeywell), GE, NuTone, etc. X10 Inc is a direct descendant of BSR in Scotland, the original marketer of X10, and was founded by the same people.

It seems like it must have tarnished the X10 brand for the other manufacturers, although perhaps that explains why GE home security systems on the late end of the X10 era manage to describe the X10 features and functionality without ever once saying "X10"... although I more assume it's because they didn't necessarily want people to realize they could buy cheaper X10 devices at RadioShack, rather than through their alarm dealer.

Weirdly the AdGuard Tracking Protection filter has a cosmetic rule that is blocking the images.

If I'm understanding the syntax correctly it seems to be this one.

    ~underverse.su,~underver.se,~minu.stv.ee,~sota.com,~7kingdoms.ru,~epicl2.com,~forum.ixbt.com,~forum.themega.ru,~gamepedia.com,~makeserver.ru,~mozhor.ru,~onliner.by,~wiktionary.org,~yandex.by,~yandex.com,~yandex.com.tr,~yandex.ru,~yandex.ua##img[width="88"][height="31"]

The comment says the intent is to hide hit counters.

Oh wow. I remember writing my first website and coveting those little banners. All the real websites had them outline their community associations and capabilities.

Oh, my website is just a bit of text in some awful arrangement of neon colours that work in every browser? Better have an animated badge for each browser so that the people know, because the people must know!

Excellent find!

Yeah, and you don't get the real effect of them outside of 800x600 or 1024x768. They look small here, but were relatively large on pages back then.

Some of these seem anachronistic; for example, there are couple for (and one against!) Discord. According to Wikipedia, Discord was released in 2015, which seems long after peak 88x31 GIF.

There's a COVID-19 one too. The top of the page says "A collection of 3182 classic 88x31 buttons from the 1990’s, 2000’s, and today in GIF format. "

Oh man, seeing "88x31" really takes me back. Internet Explorer and Netscape buttons were all the rage to put on your web site. I remember making some 88x31 buttons/logos myself too. I know it's nostalgia talking but it truly was the good old days of the web to me.

Oh I wish I could go back. I remember that these were used a lot for Affiliates links in the sidebar, if you had a niche website. Then, they evolved to a 88x16 size, or at least that's what I remember.

I used to spend a lot of hours creating those for my website... So great times, so many memories... I don't remember being happy back then, but I am sure I was, just that I didnt know.

I'd be more nostalgiac for these if Neocities pages didn't continue the trend of creating and sharing them. The bottom of this page offers a common example:

https://personally-comfy.neocities.org/

Reminded me of this:

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

...and how many of the ads on this page are for "pixel ads" (no longer functioning of course).

Reminded of that too. The owner is Alex Tew who has parlayed it into a startup or two. He’s currently working on Calm.

So many questions about that "Anti code and run"

http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/anticodeandrun2.gif

Why? Do you like writing code that causes your computer to explode and catch fire so you have to run away from it?

This page is a great example to show the benefits of caching

I still have a collection of these 88x31 GIFs from my own websites back in the day. I never ran anything worth sharing with anyone else nowadays but it was pretty fun as a kid trying to build up services and hosting. There was a whole network of people trading "affiliate" banners, linking back and forth to each other's websites. Good times!

I was surprised the list has a couple affiliates of sites I used to run as a kid. It was one of the first ways I would navigate within a network of sites without having to use an often clunky search browsing experience at the time.

Definitely nostalgia inducing.

Seeing Netflix in Page 3 is disorienting. Reminds you that it's actually a pretty old company.

I miss this version of the internet :( Everything is so boring now.

For anyone nostalgic for this type of old/weird internet, you should check out TikTok before it becomes too commercial/formalized. Still a lot of weird/random/raw stuff on there.

I'm sincerely hoping that was a sarcastic comment.

They should have built the site in Tailwind...

It's harder to find but it still exists. The hardest part is finding the retroscape <communities> rather than individuals/people. For example, I can browse a lot of retro-ish early 2000's design sites on Neocities but it is difficult to call it much of a community. Same thing with mmm.page.

https://neocities.org/browse and recently-posted-to-HN https://mmm.page/xh.inspiring

I'd love to find (or even make) a community for people who still enjoy the aesthetic of the amateur-crafted web.

Try wiby.org, hit 'surprise me' a few times.

Go to https://www.wiby.me

Its a search engine that only indexes minimalist websites. Everything on there looks like its from the 90's.

Gemini protocol is lightweight alternative to HTTP which concentrates on the actual content (like Gopher).

I spent couple of nights just browsing random people’s pages and it felt like fresh air – and very reminiscient of the nineties web!

Give Gemini a try: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

The Lagrange browser is quite nice to browse Gemini: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

The Million Dollar Homepage is still up.

Interesting. I clicked into that site and found there is no GIF on the page. It turns out that all GIFs are blocked by the uBlock with cosmetic filtering.

Unsurprisingly, the blocking rule is simply `img[width="88"][height="31"]`

Wow, this is an amazing collection of banners! For anyone have trouble with the page loading all of the gifs, I bundled all 4 of the pages into a single, massive 33 MB HTML page with all 3000+ of the GIFs encoded into data URIs. Here's the link, and all credit goes to the dabamos.de website owner for creating the collection:

https://chowderman.codeberg.page/cyber_dabamos_de_88x31_gif_...

It's so wonderful seeing the images slowly pop into existence like that!

What do you mean? They all appeared at once for me.

Now that I'm seeing this on my desktop it seems to be working just fine. Back this afternoon when I took a look at it from my phone, it wasn't. some of the gifs weren't loading and breaking the grid.

anyways, my suggestions it would be to write a small script that iterates through a list of links and dynamically create an Image and only attaching that image to the page on the 'onLoad' function (kind of a try / catch sort of thing).

Great project never the less.

p.s.: do you happen to have the Russian bride link? it's for a friend

Wow, that is quite the variety of banners. Everything from (unironic) "Netscape Now" animations and RealPlayer banners to Discord and Mastodon promos.

I have some on here: www.trinity.moe/stickers

Many of those are hotlinked to WayBack Machine backups of this page. 88x31s are still in use on the better parts of the web, particularly hobbyist neocities pages. I made two myself on the root of my site. There's a certain creativity necessary to work within <3000px that's mostly gone from the corporatized web today.

It’s so useless it’s needed.

When I see Linux advocacy from those days it's so amusing to me in retrospect: In this case, Linux 2.0 now, with Tux dropping onto an old Windows 95 style logo. I remember GNU/Linux advocacy in that era as based around free software ideas, but when I look back at that time, there was actually a lot of ironic(?) superiority.

I saw digital blasphemy on there. I checked and it still exists and he's still updating!

Flashback to dial up era. Love it.

The mix of new and old here is messing with me. Censorship pandas (A relic of early-mid 00's furry sites) and free clipart banners together with Download Discord and Mastodon buttons, ha!

Would love to compare this to a HTTP/2 version!

> A collection of 3182 classic 88x31 buttons ...

Seriously, we couldn't find 6 more to get to ... 3188 ?

I miss these days, thanks for sharing.

I remember putting these on my geocities page not really knowing what they were just to look cool.

Yep I remember it well. That was the time the internet started doing downhill :)

If anyone is planning on using any of those GIFs on their websites i have a request: don't. They are extremely annoying and distracting when i'm trying to read and they give me a headache. I'm not sure why any websites use GIFs. But very impressive collection nonetheless.

Ahhhh the good old days! Takes me back to dream weaver and flash era.

Would it be better to store these as binary blobs in a database?

Another collection waiting to be sold as an NFT soon.

That Covid-19 one sure was prescient.

Today’s dose of memberberries.

The forefather of NFTs.

The internet really is for porn.

nice!

Nice

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