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0 pointsavmich3y ago0 comments

The mindset at HTML creation revolved around representation of things like scientific articles, whitepapers, manuals, textbooks.

Why images are considered bad? Their absence seems really hurts expressiveness of at least some articles.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

dragontamer3y ago· 4 in thread

1993 is a bit before my tech awakening. But I can tell you that even in 1996, 56kbps was considered fast and 33.6kbps was more common.

I dunno how slow things were in '93, but slower for sure.

A 2MB image, and remember that JPEG and PNG weren't common yet either, would take you 10 minutes to download on 33.6 kbps.

That's 2000000 bytes, 10bits per byte (start bit + 8 bits of data + stop bit), 33kbits/sec

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That's 10 minutes of waiting for the download, doing nothing else.

icedchai3y ago

1993 was right around when 14.4K was becoming popular. I had a 9600 baud modem, which still felt fast (compared to my previous 2400.)

My first Internet connection was over a 9600 baud SLIP connection.

perilunar3y ago

But at least we had the LOWSRC attribute, so you had an idea of what you were waiting for, and could go somewhere else. Should never have been deprecated IMO.

nailer3y ago

(Asked in a mistrustful, tribalist fashion) 56K X2 or K56 Flex?

dragontamer3y ago

I was on 33.6k until 2000s, when I finally moved to broadband!!

Price Club (now Costco) was pushing some internet service that wasn't AOL, but was a lot cheaper.

LeFantome3y ago· 1 in thread

Images were “bad” because browsers were all text based at the time. Adding images meant having to create a “graphical“ web browser ( wasteful in the minds of some at the time ) and meant not being able to read all web pages with full fidelity with your text based browser of choice ( every single web user at the time ).

This was back in the days when people were using their terminal program in Windows to Telnet into the UNIX server at school / work to browse the web ( in text ) after all.

People using the World Wide Web were probably using things like Veronica and Gopher just as much.

Also, if you are connecting over a modem, images would slow things down.

I do not remember too much resistance though. Mosaic was a revolution ( literally ).

avmichOP3y ago

Even basic HTML had several levels of headers, which were supposed to be shown differently - at least fonts, if not sizes. NeXT, which was used as the first web server, had graphical capabilities. Frankly, I'm not really sure there was significant push against images at all. Even with 2400 bps modems - some of the slowest at the time - images could be loaded, surely qualitatively slower than now, but still could.

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