“I made the first animated ‘under construction’ icon”

That's quite a story. It is humorous to think about how someone could have such a huge impact in the early days of the internet.

Now animated GIF's are very passe, and I'm glad. Those old GIF laden sites were worse than modern MySpace.

This brings back memories of developing websites in the late 90's. Some people would purchase domains and want to setup a website just so they could put this animated construction worker on the site. It was enough for some businesses to look like they were cutting edge.

In 10 years time, I wonder what we'll look back on and see as the equivalent "under construction" for today's internet.

- Any guesses?

I'm 23 and was just getting started in web development as frames where becoming unpopular. It was amazing to read about a point in time where animated gifs and frames where amazing new technologies that made his life easier.

It helps me to see that maybe the things I find as very important technology-wise, might be just as futile as an animated gif.

Makes me nostalgic and depressed at what we thought was cool at that time. In 1996, I made a javascript image slide show hosted on geocities for pictures of me and my girlfriend. She was really impressed at my thoughtfulness and effort. She showed it to so many of her friends...a modern day equivalent of that would be to post a youtube video with annotations on how beautiful she is and do status updates on facebook/twitter about that video 900 times. :)

I used his animated mailbox icon when I was in 5th grade on our elementary school page (http://web.archive.org/web/19971008155351/www.ttsd.k12.or.us...). The internet has certainly become larger and less anonymous feeling.

I'm kinda interested in how they did the server push animations. Does anyone know how exactly this was set up?

That's all well and good, but who made the first horizontal rule 'rainbow' GIF, hmm?

I think I remember spiders pick of the day. Crazy.

I made the first animated "under construction" icon! Here it is!

In 1995 I had a site called the "Micro Movie Mini Multiplex" (MMMM). It originated as a collection of push animations. Push animation isn't used anymore, but it involved feeding individual animation frames through "server push", which means that a connection between the server and the client was kept alive while individual frames were fed through the connection. It was resource intensive, but when the site began it was the only way to do animation on the web. I collected every example I could find on the web and built a site that aggregated these animations. I tied the individual animations together through (what I thought was) clever commentary. The site was relatively popular (it was Spider's Pick of the Day, who remembers that?)

In December of 1995 I was searching the web for more push animations when I came across an unusual reference to a new form of animation. Netscape 2.0 was in beta, and it could handle a new form of animation. Someone had hacked the GIF image format, tweaking the interlacing so that individual frames were displayed at regular temporal intervals. There were only a handful of examples, but it was obvious to me that these "animated GIFs" were a major improvement over server push animations; you didn't need to keep a connection alive and, more interestingly, the animations could be treated like any other image... you could save the image and reuse it. I realized that these animated gifs would replace server push animations.

I rebuilt MMMM. I'm not an artist, but I spent several feverish weeks animating. I took icons that were already standard on the web, imported them into Photoshop, then modified them pixel by pixel, frame by frame, until I had a bunch of animated icons. My total output from that time is here. (The rebuilt MMMM used a couple other Netscape 2.0 innovations; frames, image maps, and Javascript.)

And people loved it. They saved the animated icons and put them on their own pages. For a very short time my site was the major supplier of animation for other people's webpages. I had given the GIFs somewhat distinctive names, so I was able to track their dispersal through Altavista searches (Altavista returned pages that contained images with specific filenames) and at one point, estimating the traffic on these pages, it occurred to me that my animations were seen by more people daily than any other animation in history.

I did all this anonymously and without monetary reward (which made sense, somehow, in the early days of the web). Eventually animated GIFs became commonplace, annoying even, and my anonymous 15 minutes of fame faded. But someday I'd like to record the moment for posterity, even if I have to do so in some forgotten thread on some community weblog.