But LOL that the "Maps" link goes to mapquest.com. In other news Mapquest still exist.
He is also the kind of person who wants an iPhone because he was impressed by the quality and capabilities of the Apple ][ computers he used in college. It's difficult for me to understand, but I have to respect that kind of loyalty in our rapidly-changing digital world.
You don't specify, but can I assume that he has the same iphone for the last 5-7 years, or he upgrades regularly?
Yeah, now I see why. The MSN home page is worthy of an article, hell, a series of articles. I wouldn't dare click a thing on that page.
My parents bought her a Kindle a while back, which is difficult to use without WiFi internet access, although it doesn't require much bandwidth. I actually made her a dial-up WiFi router using an RPi, USB WiFi and dial-up modem adapters so that she can create a WiFi network off of her dial-up connection to download e-books. My friends helped me use the GPIO to set up a nice, user-friendly button to connect and disconnect the dial-up connection, as well as a notification light to signal whether the dial-up is connected, connecting, or off. (Remember you can't leave dial-up on all the time, since you want to receive or place calls using your landline sometimes.)
Actually, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting the dial-up connection working with an open-source Linux client instead of Netscape's proprietary Windows client. I ended up having to use VirtualBox and some Linux FIFO's to listen in on what the proprietary windows client was doing when connecting. In case anyone else happens to come upon this problem: the proprietary Netscape client lowercases the password before sending it over the wire. :P
That may violate the TOS of the original connection but probably wouldn’t come up.
How? If that were true, WiFi range extenders would violate TOS as well.
I wish all the websites which reasonably can and should would have mandatory lightweight versions optimized for dial-up and comparably slow connections so you could still use your bank, read news, chat (I mean WhatsApp which doesn't even have a PC client app you could install once), download books, book hotels/flights, order stuff from e-shops and online marketplaces etc while on narrowband. Thanks G-d we still have plain old POP3+SMTP e-mail servers and clients still available at least.
Also, seeing the network request for background gradients takes me back to an era of CSS I don't miss. Anyone remember the hacks for drop shadows and rounded corners?
Originally it was kinda simple: just a 3x3 <table> with stretched images in the outer cells, then <div>-itis. Fortunately we rarely needed 9 nested <div> elements - a common trick was to create a 2000x2000px-sized PNG containing the top-left, top, and left-edge border and then another for the other side and make that a background image - the only problem was the lack of support for transparency and how IE would get PNG colors wrong for some reason until IE8 unless you altered the gamma ( https://salman-w.blogspot.com/2011/03/png-color-problem-in-i... )
After getting through the order-of-magnitude slower cookie consent page, yes.
welcome to non-garbage HTML! ;)
Copyright © 2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved - so yes to the AOL observation.
When I clicked to check my Netscape Mail, which I have never had, I was taken to an AOL.com mail login page. Plus, the Netscape page attempts to load AOL resources.
Likely just a rendered RSS feed.
Oath/Verizon is keeping these sites on some kind of life support to this day.
I wonder if the sites are deliberately made using an older design language to appeal to a certain audience?
You almost want to clone it and just replace the content with something more interesting.
> Netscape ISP is a dial-up Internet service once offered at US$9.95 per month. The company serves web pages in a compressed format to increase effective speeds up to 1300 kbit/s (average 500 kbit/s). The Internet service provider is now run by Verizon under the Netscape brand. The low-cost ISP was officially launched on January 8, 2004. Its main competitor is NetZero. Netscape ISP is no longer actively marketed, but for a time its advertising was aimed at a younger demographic, e.g., college students, and people just out of school, as an affordable way to gain access to the Internet.
For dial up, it worked well. For everything else the added latency that came with re-enconding reduced subjective connection speed considerably unless you were lucky to hit the server's cache.
It's kind of refreshing.
I usually read news from news, politics, conservative, and socialist, and libertarian subs on reddit to get an idea how ppl think about what's going on from different angles. Usually just read the headlines and the comments. Plus hacker news.
I'm thinking when I just want news this might be a good portal to just get middle of the road news without opinions or spin in an old school layout that doesn't hurt my adhd brain.
> Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation
At one point a good majority of the "internet" was served by AOLServer, a multithreaded TCL scriptable server written by NaviSoft and acquired by AOL.
Perfect.
Also, that homepage is incredibly lightweight by today's standards: 125KB with uBlock Origin enabled and still "only" 390KB with it disabled. Granted I'm looking at it on a fibre connection, but for me it loads almost instantly.
I imagine, if you're still using the Netscape dial-up internet access service over a 56Kb modem, it's going to be a rather different experience: probably 20 - 30 seconds to load with an adblocker switched on, and maybe up to a couple of minutes without one. I used to get stroppy with pages >50KB back when I still used a modem because of the time they took to load.
Still, a very beautiful and nostalgic homepage. Props to Verizon for not screwing it up.
DNS ad-blocking shows up a fair number of these methods because the sites become unavailable (not a bad thing)
Latest fetch: https://web.archive.org/web/20210408062043/https://isp.netsc...
Earliest fetch (2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20040205013205/http://www.isp.ne...
Thankfully that was the heyday of jekyll/octopress, so there were a lot of accessible dev blogs.
If this site doesn't actually track anything (and I stress I haven't checked), I guess they've just put the consent modal on everything they own just to be safe?
I guess this is because I'm based in Europe, given the majority of comments here.
Not just for nostalgic reasons but also as a parallel with how the open web these days is being co-opted by Google / Facebook.
