ALTEXXANET - 90s Internet Experience (2016) | Hacker News Reader

ALTEXXANET - 90s Internet Experience (2016)

altexxanet.org

86 pointsecliptik36 comments

The "FTP Server" page says:

> Since FTP is still widely used, generally any web browser supported today will allow you to connect.

But unfortunately this is out of date. The page was last updated in 2016, but both Chrome and Firefox dropped support for FTP in 2021.

Yes, a pretty lame and short-sighted decision by product management. Suddenly, millions of perfectly good links to resources stopped working without a 3rd party FTP client.

Does Safari still support FTP?

It would be remarkable if Brave re-enabled support for FTP. It increasingly seems like Brave is our best hope for a pro-user, pro-usability web browser.

Brave is anything but pro-user. It just a convenient built in ad blocker (unlock origin, I think) that also works with blocking YouTube ads. Once upon a time it had this thing called BAT (stilll does but don’t use it) that requires KYC to use but helped spread its marketing getting people to believe viewing ads could make them money, a few dollars a day for popover ads.. big whoop

Sure, and now with Mozilla having accumulated a parasitic CEO who syphons millions of dollars per year to her personal bank account and prioritizes tracking and paid-features over user interests, what do we have left to hope for in the browser space?

Mozilla is registered as a non-profit, but the well is poisoned.

Accumulated is a strange word choice. Just to be clear, while I'm not a fan of her recent performance as CEO, Baker wrote the Mozilla Public License, was running Mozilla as its General Manager in 1999, and was there pretty much since day one (her corporate bio calls her a co-founder which might be an embellishment, but only slightly).

I think she's the wrong person for the job and the Foundation is more about pushing left-wing politics now than it is about developing software (as in literally, they've been cutting their budget for software development, and giving the money to a bunch of left wing non-tech stuff instead). Credit where credit is due though she is not a "parasite" who just rocked up out of nowhere.

What she did in the past matters far less than what she's doing right now. As of now, she's a parasitic bad actor against the interests of the greater good. This is not in line with the spirit in which Mozilla was founded. Does this person really warrant millions in annual comp? Why should she be able to afford an estate in Woodside, CA for running a critical non-profit into the ground? It's devolved into a ridiculous situation.

Like I said I don't think she should have the job. But clarity is important and getting the facts right is important. (I also think the CEO comp is a bit of a sideshow, she was working for way below market before she got the increases, but of course, the right thing to do was not to give a non-performing CEO a raise, it was to fire her and hire someone who would perform and pay them market.)

Mozilla's very clearly a case where politics won over engineering. This is true in a very literal and unambiguous way: Former CEO Brendan Eich, an engineer, was fired for his controversial political beliefs (he didn't like gay marriage). He was then replaced by a non-engineer: a lawyer who proceeded to funnel money away from engineering and toward left wing political groups.

That's what a triumph of politics over engineering looks like.

This is all documented in their public finances. Lunduke did a recent article on it: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... (now watch the political activists come out of the woodwork because I've dared to invoke an "alt right" guy's name, and do their best to drown out the point about how Mozilla keeps cutting their engineering budget).

Bottom line, politics won, engineering lost, Firefox is in freefall, and the fate of the open web is in jeopardy because of it.

All I'm saying is let's be clear and specific about what went down here. The problem runs much deeper than Mitchell's pay.

> Credit where credit is due though she is not a "parasite" who just rocked up out of nowhere.

There's also OpenMRS Inc.[1] and possibly other non-profits.

[1] https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/OpenMRS+Inc.+Board+of+D...

The next disruptor in the browser space will not be from Mozilla nor Brave that's for sure.

Disclaimer: I'm making it.

Brave is just another Chromium fork, so no it's not going to save you (or anyone).

I just got a glimpse of a possible (dark) future (in my mind, so not like I saw someone doing something in that direction): Google announces some sort of HTML replacement, which will be supported by Chromium, and sites using it will be treated favorably in their search results...

Don't give them any ideas

eHTML: it's enriched (with ad tech and meta data to sell) HTML

Careful though, this may be closer to reality than you want to know.

> Does Safari still support FTP?

I don't think Safari has ever supported browsing FTP (it used to hand off FTP links to the Finder, but apparently even that has been disabled now?), but the macOS Finder can still mount an FTP server as a network drive.

Anything using early versions of SSL will likely be unsupported too. Certificate management is a decent form of planned obsolescence. I wonder how many of those industrial boxes that are meant to last for decades will die because of all sort of expiry dates baked all over the OS.

Looks great, but before it's too late I want to point out this is how the web looked like until about 1996 or 1998 at the latest maybe. After that, and even before CSS was fully available in browsers [1], image tiling was everywhere ie misusing the table element with image backgrounds. Tools such as DreamWeaver had this built in and it was a major selling point I believe.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS20/history.html

A lot of sites could already change the typeface or colors with <body color bgcolor> and <font face>, but many authors didn't use them.

Did those attributes come with HTML 2, or HTML 3.2?

Damn, I'm old enough to remember learning about the "new" HTML 3.2!

According to historic SGML DTDs for HTML, HTML 2 [1], dated 1995-09-21, doesn't declare a color attribute on body yet, while HTML 3.2, getting recommendation status in 1997-01-14, introduced it. HTML 4.01 strict removed [3] it, while HTML 4 loose [4] still has it. It's absent from the W3C-recommended HTML 5 spec captured as DTD [5] published in 2014, as well as the DTD for WHATWG's current HTML review draft dated January, 2023 [6].

Interestingly, <pre> and others were "deprecated" in HTML 2.0 already. Needless to say, they've become un-deprecated and are still in HTML.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html.dtd

[2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/

[3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html

[4]: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd

[5]: https://sgmljs.net/docs/w3c-html5-dtd.html

[6]: https://sgmljs.net/docs/html230116.html

Amazing:

    - fast loading pages
    - no annoying cookie dialog
    - no annoying newsletter popup
    - links with different color and underlined, so I know it's a link
    - external links pointing to useful resources and related sites
    - content adapts any screen size

Is this the future ?

Bit too fucking fast for a "90's Internet Experience". =)

Indeed... no way my 56k could have spit those pictures so fast.

Someone is trying to bring back the good old days through the Brutalist Web Design Manifesto https://brutalist-web.design/

I’m actually making a game for iOS that will allow the player to simulate upgrading a 90s computer from hardware to network and play around with a simulated early internet. This is a great resource for me. Thank you.

That sounds awesome. Interesting medium for that sort of game. Good luck!

Thank you. It won’t be detailed like some of these blogs, haha.

You'd also likely appreciate Protoweb: https://protoweb.org/

Overview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FSd-XhGLqk

Sadly seems like the 90’s experience was so much better before corporates and brogrammers ruined things.

Today I’m lucky I load a page that had more content than ads.

It would be so nice to combine some of that stuff with modern design.

I remember using the services like the ones listed here, specifically hotline. I actually got started with a clone called Carracho, and eventually moved to Haxial KDX. I met a lot of cool folks on KDX and learned about “hacking” which morphed into a full fledged career in software engineering.

Early Hotline was amazing from a hacker community perspective - I ran a series of hotline servers off of dialup, and then was able to get some hardware on my high school campus and have a server on our T3 for all of a day or two before our sysad called me in and said that hypothetically, if someone had a hypothetical Performa plugged in and was hypothetically to turn the hypothetical thing off that day, nobody would get suspended, and then that hypothetical someone could hang out in gap periods or after school and get paid to do actual IT work for the school department, learn a ton, and kickstart a fairly decent career hacking on stuff and getting paid for it - and hypothetically help run the official unofficial school Hotline server.

Super grateful to that dude to this day, I hope I'll get the chance to pass it on.

its loading too fast

403 Forbidden nginx

;)

I remember that little animated walking floppy guy on the downloads page! It used to be everywhere

There is also ProtoNet and it's browser that tries to make 1996 internet sites functional again including weather fed through from some modern API to websites of the era. I think they even have RuneScape running inside it.

For those also looking - it's Protoweb, not ProtoNet

Man I miss Hotline! Those were good times :)

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