This takes me back to the days of forum signatures, planetrenders.com, pixel fonts with 1px strokes, making emoticons (not emojis) on deviantArt, BBCode and making long-winded posts on VBulletin/PhpBB boards with the top three posts "reserved for later use".
Popular shareware proggies like "Xara3D". Don't think they'd qualify as modeling software. They had basic rotate/translate/scale transform routines in them plus glitzy effects.
(Note "shareware" usually meant cracked as far as youthful hobbyist website building from basements and bedrooms was concerned.)
There were some people who made 3D animated gifs of diverse subjects for a living (e.g. The Animation Factory). I am sure they used real 3D modelling, animation and rendering software for that.
I used to "hand-craft" HTML. Literally, writing it and no templates so each page is unique. Gallery page was manually updated.
If I kinda deeply think about it - I post may be one post every 2 months. Why the hell do I need a blogging CMS or static site generator, etc? Just craft a HTML page. You can just write it by hand. #header_h1 ...is it that much more work to write <h1>header_h1</h1>? Especially, every once in 2 months!? Each blog post would be custom. And AWESOME and set in stone. "What if I need to update the header on every single page?" Just don't. No need to update the theme ever. It's like writing a hand written letter, once you put the ink down, it's done. Mail it.
I've been doing this for a while and it's great. If you know a few tricks (optional closing tags, for example), writing HTML by hand can actually be rather pleasant. Go for it!
I don't even disagree, but even people who couldn't get "What if I need to update the header on every single page" out of their heads just embraced framesets and "server-side includes aka shtml" (and the early highly-limited css) and called it a day. Without CMS etc
Yeah, I am not condoning writing HTML for most things, but for a personal blog where creativity is probably the top thing that matters, it's funny how tightly bound our thinking gets. Sometimes, I just sit back, step out and completely dismantle the status quo.
You know what's interesting? You are not alone. Something Awful forums still have most of these things and people are even paying for that in the year 2021 :D
Deviantart? Seems you're in the wrong millennium? Deviantart started in 2000 and at that time I fondly remember us making fun of 90s web design by creating mock sites with 88x31 graphics. In -97 I remember it being all the rage though. :) Three, four or five years may not sound like a lot of time, but the web was changing at a pretty rapid pace back then.
>> At this point in time the largest provider of personal hosting was GeoCities. In order to improve brand awareness, they required that all free hosting users have a link back to GeoCities somewhere on the page. They helpfully provided default banners for these links at - you guessed it - the dimensions of 88x31
But that doesn't really explain why 83x31 was chosen by Geocities
My guess is that the creator of the first image didn't have an exact size in mind so when they were doodling in the bitmap editor it just happened to come out to that size and was trimmed accordingly. And then future images were made to fit.
I'd say 800x600 was more prevalent in 1995. You could get real 60 Hz in this mode on most monitors, which looked much better on a CRT than lower refresh rates. Cheap VGA cards could not pull this trick at 1024x768, though, and it flickered painfully.
Why 88 by 31, anyway? Who started this? A Quora poster speculates GeoCities started this trend when they provided 88x31 GeoCities buttons for their users, but the contemporary source she references actually says the trend was started by Netscape.
I also associate that button very strongly with Netscape. I was surprised to not see one which had the Netscape logo on it, only a "Netscape Now" button was there among other "Now" buttons.
I wonder if the 31px height was from the height of the logo on the right of the address bar, the one which was animated. I don't know which height it was, but it could match.
Imagine loading this page in the 90s though! One new HTTP connection at a time, a full TCP handshake. Maybe if you were lucky you were using Netscape which would load up to 4 resources at once!
I believe they had reports of popular transparent proxies that broke with it set, and the users involved typically weren't in a situation to not use those proxies.
And with higher latency it’s even worse: from Australia, latency to the server was over 350ms (going the long way round, via the USA, for some reason), and it took 80 seconds to load. With HTTP/2, it could have taken as little as two seconds to load, and I’d expect it to take less than eight seconds.
I was surprised to not find any X10 ads in there, but I guess they just never did small GIFs. Some of their examples from back in the day http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html
Given X10's sort of prominent history in the home automation world and its relationship to a lot of reputable companies, I'm really curious what the story is of how X10 Inc itself went for such a sketchy advertising campaign. X10, the protocol, was heavily backed by major home technology companies like Ademco (now Honeywell), GE, NuTone, etc. X10 Inc is a direct descendant of BSR in Scotland, the original marketer of X10, and was founded by the same people.
It seems like it must have tarnished the X10 brand for the other manufacturers, although perhaps that explains why GE home security systems on the late end of the X10 era manage to describe the X10 features and functionality without ever once saying "X10"... although I more assume it's because they didn't necessarily want people to realize they could buy cheaper X10 devices at RadioShack, rather than through their alarm dealer.
Interestingly all of those images seem to be for their camera products. But long before those, X10 sold remote control systems that switched devices on/off over in-home electrical wiring (using the independent X10 protocol). The reliability of these systems were pretty bad as I recall. They offered something like 16 channels with various management devices that allowed for complicated scheduling of device switching.
X10 was the first real home automation standard. The protocol was subject to interference and poor propagation, and did not use any EDAC or acknowledgement so it was pretty unreliable. It was still pretty useful for some things, and X10 devices are still being sold.
Heh, I remember those. I had my first internship around that time and one of the made-up jobs my boss at the time had me do was look into those switches. Another intern told me he just wanted someone to look into it since he wanted to try using them on his own home. :)
Oh wow. I remember writing my first website and coveting those little banners. All the real websites had them outline their community associations and capabilities.
Oh, my website is just a bit of text in some awful arrangement of neon colours that work in every browser? Better have an animated badge for each browser so that the people know, because the people must know!
Some of these seem anachronistic; for example, there are couple for (and one against!) Discord. According to Wikipedia, Discord was released in 2015, which seems long after peak 88x31 GIF.
Oh man, seeing "88x31" really takes me back. Internet Explorer and Netscape buttons were all the rage to put on your web site. I remember making some 88x31 buttons/logos myself too. I know it's nostalgia talking but it truly was the good old days of the web to me.
Oh I wish I could go back. I remember that these were used a lot for Affiliates links in the sidebar, if you had a niche website. Then, they evolved to a 88x16 size, or at least that's what I remember.
I used to spend a lot of hours creating those for my website... So great times, so many memories... I don't remember being happy back then, but I am sure I was, just that I didnt know.
I'd be more nostalgiac for these if Neocities pages didn't continue the trend of creating and sharing them. The bottom of this page offers a common example:
I still have a collection of these 88x31 GIFs from my own websites back in the day. I never ran anything worth sharing with anyone else nowadays but it was pretty fun as a kid trying to build up services and hosting. There was a whole network of people trading "affiliate" banners, linking back and forth to each other's websites. Good times!
I was surprised the list has a couple affiliates of sites I used to run as a kid. It was one of the first ways I would navigate within a network of sites without having to use an often clunky search browsing experience at the time.
It's harder to find but it still exists. The hardest part is finding the retroscape <communities> rather than individuals/people. For example, I can browse a lot of retro-ish early 2000's design sites on Neocities but it is difficult to call it much of a community. Same thing with mmm.page.
For anyone nostalgic for this type of old/weird internet, you should check out TikTok before it becomes too commercial/formalized. Still a lot of weird/random/raw stuff on there.
Interesting. I clicked into that site and found there is no GIF on the page. It turns out that all GIFs are blocked by the uBlock with cosmetic filtering.
Unsurprisingly, the blocking rule is simply `img[width="88"][height="31"]`
Wow, this is an amazing collection of banners! For anyone have trouble with the page loading all of the gifs, I bundled all 4 of the pages into a single, massive 33 MB HTML page with all 3000+ of the GIFs encoded into data URIs. Here's the link, and all credit goes to the dabamos.de website owner for creating the collection:
Now that I'm seeing this on my desktop it seems to be working just fine. Back this afternoon when I took a look at it from my phone, it wasn't. some of the gifs weren't loading and breaking the grid.
anyways, my suggestions it would be to write a small script that iterates through a list of links and dynamically create an Image and only attaching that image to the page on the 'onLoad' function (kind of a try / catch sort of thing).
Great project never the less.
p.s.: do you happen to have the Russian bride link? it's for a friend
Many of those are hotlinked to WayBack Machine backups of this page. 88x31s are still in use on the better parts of the web, particularly hobbyist neocities pages. I made two myself on the root of my site. There's a certain creativity necessary to work within <3000px that's mostly gone from the corporatized web today.
When I see Linux advocacy from those days it's so amusing to me in retrospect: In this case, Linux 2.0 now, with Tux dropping onto an old Windows 95 style logo. I remember GNU/Linux advocacy in that era as based around free software ideas, but when I look back at that time, there was actually a lot of ironic(?) superiority.
The mix of new and old here is messing with me. Censorship pandas (A relic of early-mid 00's furry sites) and free clipart banners together with Download Discord and Mastodon buttons, ha!
If anyone is planning on using any of those GIFs on their websites i have a request: don't. They are extremely annoying and distracting when i'm trying to read and they give me a headache. I'm not sure why any websites use GIFs. But very impressive collection nonetheless.
Man I wish I could go back.