The Froggy Page

September 27, 2001 7:10 PM

The Froggy Page was the Cool Site of the Day from August 8, 1994. It's the oldest site archived there without the disclaimer, "site no longer live". The page sure looks like it was built in '94 -- not even a single table! (Can anyone who was coding back then confirm if the code is really that old?) Does anyone have a favorite site from those good old days?
posted by mattpfeff (36 comments total)

.au file? address tag?

yep. looks that old to me.

crazy.
posted by jcterminal at 7:20 PM on September 27, 2001

Well, that page does have JavaScript, and not just any JavaScript, but one that deals with frames. Both of these were introduced in NS 2, which came out in 1995, so obviously some changes have been made since 1994 (and even that is ignoring the 1994-2001 copyright date).
posted by kickingtheground at 7:23 PM on September 27, 2001

WTF is an address tag?
posted by howa2396 at 7:36 PM on September 27, 2001

The Diplomatic Pouch is one of the first sites I remember going to with any frequency, mostly because I was usually playing Diplomacy-by-email at work. I really appreciated my employer's fast connection. It seemed like magic.

The site seems mostly unchanged from what I remember from 1995. Maybe a little prettier? I dunno, that seems forever ago.
posted by marknau at 7:38 PM on September 27, 2001

Well, Justin Hall's Links to the Underground is still around, although it looks nothing like it used to. That was the site that really turned me on to the anarchic, creative, personal side of the web. Not to mention the porn...

It would have been my favourite jumping off point in 1995.

Looking back, I think Justin pioneered what we now know as blogs, with a mixture of regularly updated links, and presonal revelation and commentary.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:42 PM on September 27, 2001

howa2396 - Brian Wilson describes the address tag. I've had such a lot of mileage out of his Index DOT Html site - I wish I could give him a job.

Come to think of it, that has to be one of the longer lived sites on the web - it goes back to 1996.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:50 PM on September 27, 2001

1993.

(Though Carl's actually being a little naughty here, because BODY BGCOLOR didn't appear until Netscape 1.1 in 1994.)

But I'm looking through my .mosaic-hotlist-default from autumn 1994 (when I abandoned Mosaic for Netscape 0.9beta) and there are some names that bring back tons of memories: Ranjit's Playground, Topquark's Underbelly, the Universe of Discourse, Beauty For Ashes, IUMA... whoah. (Imagine a music site where all the files were in .au format. Eeesh.)

Most of those early sites were student pages, and so were doomed either to be lost at graduation or turned into something rich and strange. But it was all Discordianism and whatnot back then. Oh, and Justin Hall, who never redesigns, so much as overlays.
posted by holgate at 7:52 PM on September 27, 2001

Actually, make that 1995 for 1.1 and tables and BODY BACKGROUND and all that shit.

(The first corporate site I built -- in late 1995 -- didn't use tables. Instead, we used nested UL tags to get the left margin. Lordy.)
posted by holgate at 7:56 PM on September 27, 2001

Two of my most favorite sites from yesteryear were Justin's Links which as stated above is still going strong! I would still classify the guy as having one the best personal pages on the net. For the amount of years he's been going at it, I would hate to take a look at his directory structure!

But my most, most favorite was the Web Queen of Canada, Tabatha Holtz. She was great when she was online, but I have not seen her in years, at least a personal site. I know she still runs Cats in Canada, as I got an email from her a while back, but haven't heard from her since. Anyone know whatever happend to her?!?
posted by punkrockrat at 7:56 PM on September 27, 2001

Humor my naive question: When did server-side includes (.shtml) come along? Because this site uses them — I would guess for the contact info at the bottom, because I can't see any other reason for it. Style is vintage, certainly, but I'd imagine that links have been added and broken links fixed/removed since then. And lookit the icons!
posted by mcwetboy at 8:01 PM on September 27, 2001

Oh, the CENTER tag on the Froggy Page is Netscape-specific, so that can't have been added until the time of the 0.9 betas, in autumn '94. I still remember the USENET fury over the perceived non-HTMLishness of that tag...
posted by holgate at 8:02 PM on September 27, 2001

The first website I remember visiting was in... 1993, maybe? '94 at the latest. It was called the "Subway", I think. It was some sort of portal, if I recall correctly. Can't find it now, though. "Subway" is sort of a common word, and all...

And whitehouse.gov, back in the day! I sent the president an email inviting him to my highschool graduation (in jest, of course). A few *months* later, I received a typed letter, talking about his busy schedule, "signed" by the president. That was funny. I think I still have that somewhere.
posted by whatnotever at 8:08 PM on September 27, 2001

From my NS 1.1 Bookmarks: Steve Allen's Musical Homeboy Page. Warning embedded midi file.
posted by bjgeiger at 8:24 PM on September 27, 2001

Well, Justin Hall's Links to the Underground is still around...
I went to high school with Justin, well I was in 8th grade when was senior, but I guess that's close enough (not that that really means anything). I too recall the early days of his page. It was cool then, and still is today.
posted by Bag Man at 8:52 PM on September 27, 2001

Oh, I remember seeing this page in 1995 and thinking it was utter genius. (View the source, Luke.) The man behind it? Clay Shirky, who I'm now pleased to call a friend.
posted by holgate at 9:14 PM on September 27, 2001

My campus had a very advanced computer setup for the time and was online from the beginning (I had e-mail, but none of my friends at university did at first, so I had no one to send it to outside of school). I remember using Mosaic back in 1993-94 (I was at school from 1990-95, BMath) and be astonished that there were so many sites to visit, with so much information.

But I realized there was no Toronto Maple Leaf web page anywhere to be found. So I hacked one out using vi and posted it on my university account. It was the first amateur Leaf page on the web (there was a basic Nando site and one other I think). Unfortunately, I had to graduate eventually, and my site would have disappeared, if I hadn't handed it off to someone I'd never heard of before but was willing to take care of it. After reading this discussion, I decided to search for it, and I actually found it. She's added a bit more to it, but I can definitely verify the age of my page by checking out the last listed captain here.

Wow. I can't believe remnants of that page are still around. I feel old.
posted by Grum at 9:32 PM on September 27, 2001

what about the image map? weren't those cgi in the beginning?
posted by o2b at 9:46 PM on September 27, 2001

man... considering the pages being mentioned here, thank god Opera doesn't support the blink tag.
posted by lotsofno at 9:50 PM on September 27, 2001

address tag?
I actually use the address tag a lot more now than I ever used to. The address adds meaning, and I can use CSS to control the formatting so it's not italic if I don't want it to be.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:35 PM on September 27, 2001

I pine for Mirsky's Worst of the Web.
posted by Su at 11:29 PM on September 27, 2001

I miss Word.

I was on the web in late ’94. Made a site in ’95. I remember reading a Newsweek article about the launch of HotWired and thinking it’d never work. I guess I’m sorta right. The web was bunk until I saw Crooked Man, then I started thinking it could be pretty cool.

Mostly it’s still bunk.
posted by raaka at 12:27 AM on September 28, 2001

One of my early Web favorites is Dead People Server, around since 1994.
posted by rcade at 5:12 AM on September 28, 2001

Hey, what's wrong with the address tag? I just used it in my personal HTML-Strict+CSS-positioned site, and I son't think it's old hat thank you very much!

I hated <center> too, preferring the HTML 3.0 <p align="center"> approach. :-) Used it in my first site (design unchanged since early '95) starting me on the road to annoying HTML purist!
posted by BobInce at 5:43 AM on September 28, 2001

<center> is still a bad idea. Actually, pretty much everything that's been done to HTML since its introduction has been a bad idea with the exception of CSS, but that's too little too late. Oh well. What are the odds that somebody will build an alternative to the world wide web that uses a stateful underlying protocol and a content language that actually separates content from form? And what are the odds that it will catch on?

posted by jacobm at 7:10 AM on September 28, 2001

Magdalena Donnea's "Colors" was one of my all time favorite sites. I've long since lost the URL, but her stuff was just fascinating, featuring great use of rich, rich color, intricate framesets, and RealAudio stream syncronization. Incredibly sexy. I really miss it.
posted by eamondaly at 8:57 AM on September 28, 2001

Eamondaly: Donea's homepage is alive and kicking.
posted by rcade at 9:03 AM on September 28, 2001

Colors too.
posted by Sapphireblue at 9:44 AM on September 28, 2001

My school (Indiana University) was one of those which was wired from the start, and one of the few schools which allowed everyone to get Internet access, not just computer science students. Hence, I did lots of web wandering back in the day. (I was a computer lab monitor in 1994-1995 so I had a lot of time to do that)
I loved Mirsky's Worst of the Web. I miss that site a lot. I also used to go to Justin Hall's page quite a bit, though I hadn't looked at it for ages. The Useless Pages has gone through a few incarnations, but it's still there. I also liked URoulette was fun for random web wandering. I actually built a site back then which was fairly complex for its time. It's gone now, but I still miss my first web page.
posted by SisterHavana at 10:22 AM on September 28, 2001

My school (Indiana University) was one of those which was wired from the start, and one of the few schools which allowed everyone to get Internet access, not just computer science students. Hence, I did lots of web wandering back in the day. (I was a computer lab monitor in 1994-1995 so I had a lot of time to do that)
I loved Mirsky's Worst of the Web. I miss that site a lot. I also used to go to Justin Hall's page quite a bit, though I hadn't looked at it for ages. The Useless Pages has gone through a few incarnations, but it's still there. I also liked URoulette was fun for random web wandering. I actually built a site back then which was fairly complex for its time. It's gone now, but I still miss my first web page.
posted by SisterHavana at 10:22 AM on September 28, 2001

My school (Indiana University) was one of those which was wired from the start, and one of the few schools which allowed everyone to get Internet access, not just computer science students. Hence, I did lots of web wandering back in the day. (I was a computer lab monitor in 1994-1995 so I had a lot of time to do that)
I loved Mirsky's Worst of the Web. I miss that site a lot. I also used to go to Justin Hall's page quite a bit, though I hadn't looked at it for ages. The Useless Pages has gone through a few incarnations, but it's still there. I also liked URoulette was fun for random web wandering. I actually built a site back then which was fairly complex for its time. It's gone now, but I still miss my first web page.
posted by SisterHavana at 10:22 AM on September 28, 2001

"Netscape?"

Woah, you guys must be like, CAVE PEOPLE!
posted by starduck at 3:56 PM on September 28, 2001

Find The Spam!

...an old favorite.
posted by Down10 at 5:11 PM on September 28, 2001

(Good to see eamondaly posting, given that I still witter on about his wonderful personal site, which vanished in, oh, about 1995. If I remember rightly, it was run through CGI on a non-standard port because the BU admins didn't allow normal web servers...)
posted by holgate at 7:24 PM on September 28, 2001

What's scary is that the pictures of the cartoon frogs on the main page (the second from the left, and the one on the far right), were drawn by me (in black and white and without the pallette and the musical notes) around 1987. My how things get around.
posted by plinth at 2:02 PM on September 29, 2001

Nick, you're such a sweetie.
posted by eamondaly at 7:52 PM on October 1, 2001