Internet Nostalgia

Internet Nostalgia Well as you may have heard from various other blogs, this week served up a heaping dose of pain in the form of academic expectations. If you ever want to know the surface area of a golf ball with radius 3cm covered with 100 dimples hemispherically embedded with radius 3mm, I can help you out. (note: turns out thats impossible, you cant fit 100 dimples with those dimensions). MIT is getting tricky like that. Much like the leaves have abruptly shed their quiet greens to give way to an explosion of reds yellows and oranges, MIT has shed the appearance of normal university and has abruptly shifted into high gear. Dont let that freak you out though, MIT is really really good at helping you adjust and prepare for such shifts. (read: Pass/No Record. Embrace it) All this difficulty may make you yearn for a simpler time, a quieter time. A time when the internet was young. You kids and your Web 2.0, user submitted content, and fancy flash and java. Back in the day we didnt have all the bells and whistles, like the ability to tell someone their video on YouTube of a baby hamster was OmGZZ TAT HMASTER IS SOO HAWT LOL! No, back then, if we wanted to know how a babby was formed, it meant an akward talk with mom and dad. If only there were a way to show you the humble beginnings of the net, before LOLcats and chocolate rain. Ladies and Gentleman, I have found such a way. Thanks to the Internet Archives, Ive managed to pull up some of the dusty old versions of the web, some from as many as 12 years ago. Laugh, gape, and enjoy: Well start things off with something iconic, and what could be more iconic than McDonalds? This is what a multi-billion dollar company came up with for the web in 1996: McDonalds-1996 Whoa, thats it? Yes folks, back in the day that was the bleeding edge of technology, two colors and a tiny gif of a man on a ladder. Well one example isnt a fair respresentation of companies right? lets choose another high-profile company with tons of money to throw into a web design team. Pepsi-1996 OMG MY EYES!!!! Im pretty sure my retinas have just melted. They seem to have taken their design cues from a group of 12 year old Myspace designers. (if any of you have a myspace that looks like that, please please fix it.) This does teach us a few important lessons though: 1) more is definitely not always better 2) non-tesselating backgrounds should stay non-tesselating. I dont know if you can read that tiny text but apparently there is a low-res version for people with speeds lower than 28.8 kbps Lower than 28.8kbps?! I didnt even know that was possible!! Once again though, its hard to blame them, I mean after all this is new technology, if we want an example of whats truly possible we should turn to some kind of Institute of Technology.. MIT-1996 Surprised? I sure was. A tiny little picture and some hyperlinks are a long way from the ever-changing home page of today. But its better than some other universities up the river Harvard-1997 No way would I think that website belonged to one of most elite schools in the country. If I didnt know any better I wouldve called that a fake. It doesnt quite inspire the same awe and respect that the school deserves does it? But apparently a website that failed to inspire respect for an intimidating organization was pretty common, as evidenced by. CIA-1998 THATS the CIA website? Thats the super scary organization that can see you from space and erase your brain with lights? seriously? Am I supposed to be afraid of a website that has black text on a white background? Oh but they sternly warn you that this is an official government website, and you can tell theyre serious because the text is red. Psh Im more afraid of goats. (Seriously, goats freak me out. Look at their eyes, thats not right) Luckily the turn of the millenium brought on huge leaps in technology, including things like iPods. Apple-2001 Believe it or not, back before the iCant-think-of-an-original-name craze caught on, there was simply iPod. No nano, no touch, no shuffle, just iPod. It sported an ultra-slim 5 Gb hard drive and promised a whopping 10 hours of play time. Lets evaluate ultra-slim for a second: Ultra-slim eh? yea ok, thats about as ultra-slim as Rosie ODonnell at a buffet. Seriously that thing looks like it needs a luggage tag to be carried anywhere. Pause for a second though and realize that that behemoth held 5Gb. Ive got SD cards that have more memory than that now. A 4 Gb USB memory stick will run you $20 now. Isnt that incredible? Nowadays the similar iPod Classic has 120 Gb, 36 hours of audio, color screen, and costs $50 less. Thats really amazing. And the trend with the iPod Touch and iPhone has been to double memory every year. That kind of growth is mind blowing, almost as mind blowing as the social networking phenomena, wonder what that looked like in its infancy? Myspace-2003 Hehe that was the site that started off the social networking craze for a lot of people. look how easy it is to get signed up! Three steps, thats it! Then you too can be stalked as you fill your profile with tons of glittery gifs and music and surveys about 1,285 things no one cares about! Wow you ate lasagna for lunch? Fascinating! Of course Myspace was just the beginning, nowadays most everyone is in love with Facebook. Facebook-2005 Yes, thats was the old facebook. Somehow I dont think thats what everyone has in mind when they join the groups like Bring back the OLD FACEBOOK NOW or omgz Ill be mad! For those unaware, Facebook was once an exclusively college networking site. A way to keep in touch with your college friends. Then they made a high school facebook, then merged the two, opened it up to anyone in the US, then the world, and of course the next logical step would be the galaxy. 1 Friend Request from Gllxxazzrog cant be too far off. One website thats as universal (at least to you guys) is the MIT admissions site. Are you ready for this? MIT Admissions-1996 No blogs (and thus no bloggers, EEP!) and a bulleted list. Lets take a look at the Freshman Admissions page (which is the great grandaddy of the website youre lookin at right now.) Theres some great information in there. For one thing, back in the day an interview was REQUIRED, and there was none of this MyMIT application tracker or Online Application stuff, it was papers mailed to you and you waited for your letter and that was that. No camping out on the decisions page hitting refresh every 5 seconds, if your postman was feeling particularly underpaid that day, you wouldnt find out until maybe 2 or 3 days later. Well theres a peek at what the Internet used to look like. Clearly there have been some welcome advances in design and interactivity, but before you go and brag about how great your new-fangled web is, consider this: Back then, the MIT admission rate was 25%. If that doesnt make you yearn for the old internet, nothing will.