Timewarp. No, really.
So, the other day I was testing some search engine strings for Jeff’s new site to make sure that we had gotten rid of or redirected all the remaining bits of his old site. One of the strings was “wedding photographer homestead” (the Homestead is an uber-nice resort here in Virginia), and looking over the first page of results I checked out these two sites:
weddingphotographer.homestead.com
professionalphotographer.homestead.com
I had to do a double take. It turns out they’re both the same photographer, just different portal pages. Now, I’ve come across my fair share of websites that look like they are from 1995, but these were special. I never thought it was possible for a site to look like it was made BEFORE the internet was widely used, in say…1983. Here are a few highlights I’m sure you’ll notice:
Enraptured, like I was staring at some creature long-thought extinct, I explored a bit further checking out a few of the “reciprocal links”: Fort Laramie Trading Post, Fix All, and the Fort Laramie American Grill
Was this real? Had I died and gone to pre-AOL internet heaven?
Turns out all these businesses are in the same town, Fort Laramie, WY, and the sites (and there are more of them too) were all created by the same company, Affordable Advertising.
I couldn’t find dates on any of these pages to see if they are in fact “current”, but this snippet of code gives some insight, if not more confusion (don’t try and look and the rest of the source though, your head may asplode):
!doctype html public “-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN//2.0″
html
head
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″
meta name=”Generator” content=”Microsoft Publisher 98″
Now, I’m not trying to be snarky at all by posting this stuff…I just feel that it’s almost like a museum; a now-rare slice of americana (and the internet) dying to be shared with those who can appreciate it.
Let me know what other gems you find.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Did you look at the wedding photos on that site? Yikes.
“Depending Upon Your Computer & Monitor Settings . . . Some Colors May Not Appear Accurate!” is a big understatement. My guess is that the problem has less to do with my monitor and more to do with his scanner.
Are you familiar with the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org? You might want to check that out. Obviously there’s a difference between pages that are still “live” on the internet and those that are only housed in some archive, but there’s still a lot of interesting stuff in the archive.
You should also check this out: http://gizmodo.com/349333/old-websites-sure-are-funny
Finally, I’d like to point out that my thesis advisor still uses blinking tags on his websites and often the text he has blinking is so long that you can’t read it all during a single blink. In his defense, he does know it’s cheesy.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:51 am
The pictures were what grabbed me at first, they’re pretty great.
Yeah, I actually meant to mention the Wayback machine, but I totally forgot.
That gizmodo link is pretty good, I saw this similar page recently:
http://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm?hoho
Although none of those are anywhere near the Fort Laramie sites.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I like the instructions for every little thing, such as this, on the photo page:
“If You Experience Any Blank “X” Boxes . . . “Right-Click” Onto Them Then, “Left-Click” Onto “Show Picture!”"