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Comment by ArinaS | Hacker News Reader

I think anything before Frutiger Aero became popular (and it didn't in 2003) can be considered "early" Internet.

Early Internet is before the Web was its main thing.

Early Web is before most netizens (remember that?) had ever heard or seen the term "blog", and much of the web was folks' "home pages" on whatever weird topic they were interested in (some were effectively "blogging", but that wasn't a term yet—"web log" might see limited use). This was the Nerd Web.

Mid-period is from the rise of "blog" to the rise of the smartphone, Google capitulating in the never-ending war on spammers and ruining itself instead, and Facebook coming about. Roughly '08 would be the end of this period. Call this the Macromedia Flash Web, perhaps.

Everything since that is the Late, or Hellscape, Web, an age dominated to an extreme degree by spam, scams, ads, astroturfing, and absolute insanity becoming normalized and spilling over into real life. This is the part that made it clear we'd have been better off never inventing any of this.

I hope you realize the irony of picking an arbitrary OS theme, something that has no correlation to the Internet in any way, as a meaningful point in the history of the Internet.

As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.

You're trying to argue that 2003 isn't the early Internet. Seems like you're trying to have your "Ackchyually..." moment right now because you didn't know 4chan existed.

2003 was after the dot com boom and crash. There is no possible definition of "early Internet" that can include 2003.

No, I’m saying the Internet was already in mass adoption for the preceding decade. Talk to old timers and they’ll reminisce that the early days of the internet were great until Eternal September in 93. Others will reminisce about the days of BBS. I’m saying “early internet” is a relative term that has more to do with the person interpreting than any objective definition.

I put the start of the mainstreaming of the internet in July 1993, the month a cartoon was published in the New Yorker captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Before then, it was quite unusual to see coverage of the internet by the mainstream press (and what coverage I saw took a theoretical or "far" view, i.e., as part of a discussion of governmental policy). After then, coverage exploded.

This is an American perspective: the timing was probably different in other countries.

Let's just call it "pre Facebook/Twitter" Internet, then. Because that's what it is.

It's clearly when AOL started offering a monthly subscription for unlimited Internet usage.

Frutiger Aero didn’t exist before 2017.

It did since at least 2004[1].

[1] - https://yenimedya.aydin.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/3....

That’s dated 2023… am I missing something? The aesthetic did not exist in 2004. It was created in the late 2010s by juxtaposing materials from the early 2000s. This created a new style from old materials. The same way you might combine art deco motifs in new ways in the 1980s, inventing “art deco revival”.

> "The aesthetic did not exist in 2004"

Well, this research states that "Between 2004 and 2013, Frutiger Aero was influential in advertising, media, stock images, cinema, gaming, and spatial design". That's page 4.

There’s no justification given or source cited. You can’t just dig up a paper somebody wrote that agrees with you—you have to actually read the paper to understand what it says and what support it gives to that position.

I see NO support for this position. No reasoning, no primary sources, no secondary sources, not even the personal experiences of the author.

I have not seen any evidence that Frutiger Aero existed before 2017, and 2017 seems like the most likely creation date to me. That’s when it was created, by combining materials from the 2000s in new ways. Call it “bricolage”, perhaps.

Addenda: if you scroll through Google Image search results for Frutiger Aero, you’ll see what looks to me like an obvious lack of actual materials from the 2000s. I see a screenshot of Windows XP, a screenshot of the Nintendo Wii home screen. Maybe a few other random screenshots of apps or web sites. As far as I can tell, Frutiger Aero was invented by taking these few materials and extrapolating a whole aesthetic movements out of it. I see a lot of artwork dated from the 2020s labeled as Frutiger Aero—that’s the true nexus of the aesthetic, Gen Z adults recreating a half-remembered image from their childhoods. Which is fine. It’s just not from 2004. Like how Vaporwave is not actually from the 1990s or 1980s, Vaporwave is from the mid-2010s. I love Vaporwave, but I know that it’s not from the past; it’s a modern remix of elements from the past.

Fruiter Aero is a term that retroactively applies to the style of a certain time. Look at Windows Vista. Windows Vista's design is what we now call Fruitger Aero. Windows Vista came out in 2007. It's a retroactive term, yes, but how can you claim the thing it refers to didn't exist before 2007, when Windows Vista is a shining example of it?

The term was coined that year but the actual style exists at least since, well, Windows Aero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero#Legacy

I don’t think that this corresponds to the thing called “Frutiger Aero”.

The Windows Aero style existed in 2004, and somewhere around 2017, the style Frutiger Aero was invented, partly based on those styles but partly new.

Just like Vaporwave.

Some aesthetics existed in the past (like art deco), some are invented out of materials from the past (like art deco revival).

I think the article is quite clear in its explanation. The keyword is retrospectively.

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